The crime ofappeasement

AN INTERIM report of the Joint Select Committee convened to host an Inquiry into Crime, the Security, Safety and Protection of Citizens took the unusual step of releasing only marginally obscured particulars of evidence received detailing the relationships between two deputy political leaders of the UNC with suspected criminals.

The interim report specifically requested the removal of Dr Roodal Moonilal, who was serving on the JSC, because he could not proceed as an interrogator into matters in which he had been cited as, at the very least, a material witness.

The report detailed several troubling accusations, specifically a meeting at the Hyatt Regency between Moonilal and two known “persons of interest” to the police and the role of Jearlean John in allegedly engaging with suspected criminals while campaigning for the UNC. Of more immediate concern to the public is a police investigation, detailed in the interim report, which suggests a politically motivated action to incite criminals to murder. According to the report, the TTPS gathered intelligence suggesting that a known gang leader gave an order to “increase the homicide rate” through random shootings of innocent people at the end of 2019.

The police are aware of 800 active shooters, people with weapons who use them for murders and the report notes that over the last three years, 323 people arrested for firearms were released on their first court hearing.

There is a multiplicity of such factoids scattered through the interim report, not all of them directly relevant to the motion to remove Moonilal from serving on the JSC, but one thing that isn’t mentioned in the report – signed by its chairman, Fitzgerald Hinds – is his own party’s culpability in engaging with known felons, reasoning such contacts superficially as being in pursuit of appeasement.

On September 6, 2006, prime minister Patrick Manning held a “peace” meeting with gang members at Crowne Plaza, now the Radisson. Manning previously met in 2002 with other gang leaders at the Ambassador Hotel. The 2006 meeting, organised by the Laventille Executive Council, created a peace pact called It Must Work. It did not. Within two years, 16 known gang members had been killed, four of whom attended the meeting.

More recently, there is the political career of Marlene McDonald, which has been repeatedly derailed because of accusations of affiliations with questionable characters. Addressing the JSC on National Security in January, CoP Gary Griffith made it clear that these decisions have compromised the capacity of the police, most directly by making significant resources available to criminals.

“When we affiliate ourselves with criminal elements,” he told the politicians, “there is going to be a price to pay.” It might be argued that citizens pay twice, first with their taxes, repurposed for crime through state projects, and again with their lives.