PoS won’t be won with guns

After gunmen Richard Thomas and Joel Roberts and two conspirators shot and killed Lystra Rodriguez and wounded two passengers and six passers-by on Tuesday, Port of Spain mayor Joel Martinez acknowledged that there was “a lot of work to do in ensuring that the city streets are safe.”

That morning, five-year-old Zackary Rodriguez was shot in the leg in a drive-by shooting in Rock City, Laventille. On Monday, in three separate incidents, gunmen shot at the George Street apartment complexes, Richard Weekes, 29, of Calvary Hill was shot nine times in a drive-by shooting and that night, Alvin Wallace, a homeless man sleeping near the Freelancers Pan Tent, was shot dead.

The usual response to such wanton killing sprees and cavalier use of firearms is a police clampdown and search dragnets that pacify the selected neighbourhoods for a few weeks before there’s another outbreak of violence. But, such engagements inevitably place police officers in an adversarial relationship with the communities they are meant to protect and serve.

It’s a simple fact that prolonged police surveillance and patrolling have only resulted in crime outbreaks elsewhere on the islands. But Martinez is correct, there is work to be done and if it is to be effective in the long term, it demands a meaningful engagement with the communities that are plagued by crime and through its alternative social structure, continuously offer it fertile ground to flourish.

In 2016, Attorney General Faris Al Rawi said that the cost of holding a prisoner on Remand Yard was between $20,000 and $25,000 annually. The total cost of taxpayers for a prison system that does a better job of training criminals than rehabilitating them was more than $50 million per year.

For that spending, the public gets a recidivism rate of 74 percent. Only one in four inmates released from prison doesn’t end up back in jail.

The alternative, as the PoS Mayor said on Thursday is real work, the challenge of unraveling a once successful social fabric that’s tangled itself into self-defeating knots and dead-ends that are often chillingly literal.

It does no good to wring our hands about how things look to visitors if we don’t address the collapse of social structures among our poorest and least capable citizens and the deadly toll it takes on us all.

Civil society must enter those spaces to offer real opportunities to disadvantaged young people, meaningful alternatives to crime and the fleeting rewards skimmed from the spoils of it. That won’t be done by men with body armor and guns.

It will take peers, mentors, conversations and engagement in an investment in rebuilding broken communities in a sustained effort that spans not years or electoral cycles, but decades and generations.