Criminologist: Griffith's absence not reason for murder increase

Criminologist Dr Keron King does not think the absence of former police commissioner Gary Griffith has led to an increase in murders.

In a social media post on October 31, Griffith pointed out there were fewer murders in the first seven months of 2021 as compared to 2020.

He noted the decrease in murders happened before he left office as commissioner in September.

But King rejected Griffith’s assessment when he was asked about it on TTT’s Now Morning Show on Monday.

King said, “The (former) commissioner is engaged in an activity that is quite common amongst law enforcement units across the world.

“Whenever crimes go down, they usually say it’s because of them. It makes sense if you think about it, because they are engaged in operations all the time and whenever they see some type of success, they usually try to attribute it to their actions.”

King is instead correlating the "lull" in murders, and other predatory crimes in early 2021 with the added covid19 restrictions which began to be implemented in April to curb the movement of people and the spread of covid19.

If there has been any recent uptick in crimes, King theorised that it may be due to the recent removal of these restrictions.

King noted that since the start of the covid19 pandemic in March 2020, criminologists around the world have noticed a decrease in some crimes like murders and an increase in others like domestic violence. He said criminologists have attributed the dynamic in the different crime rates to the relationships between offenders, victims, time, place and space.

He explained, “When we talk about predatory crime or street crimes – those crimes that happen on the streets – we tend to deny this general idea of routine activities.

“When you’re speaking about this predatory crime, these types of offences only really occur when an offender and a victim find themselves in the same space at the same time without a guardian to protect them.

“It is the reason why we find in crime data that murder, or crime on the whole, isn’t distributed evenly across the nation and they occur in pockets. The answer for that is because of this relationship between time and space, and offender and potential victim.”

From the 1950s-1960s, King said there was an increase in home robberies around the world.

King said criminologists have long considered women's entering the workforce in greater numbers during this time a factor in the increase of these crimes.

He said this is one example of a crime rate being affected by the relationship between offenders, victims, time, place and space.

“That intersection of space and time (then) made the home a suitable target. It had nothing else to do with anything but the mere fact that a society, our society, evolved with women entering the workforce, and that was a consequence.”

“Now what the (current) pandemic did is, it messed up those routine activities, so of course potential offenders and victims were no longer intersecting in the same time and space as it pertains to predatory crimes.”

“So it makes sense in the early part of the pandemic that we would have seen a reduction in a lot of predatory, opportunistic, street-crime type offences…again, because of this idea of routine activities not lining up.”

But King is also calling for the police, and those in authority, to stop assessing the effectiveness of Trinidad and Tobago’s crime fight on the basis of fluctuations in the crime rate.

Instead, he is urging them to improve their crime-fighting strategies from being reactive to being protective, which includes using more evidence-based crime-fighting strategies.

He lamented, “Unfortunately in TT, we are not engaged in evidence-based policing.

“(We can) implement interventions – whether it be change in patrols, new investigations or new operations – but what typically happens in evidence-based policing is we measure it, we test it and we apply social-science principles to impact upon it.”

“When it comes to criminal justice policy, we (as a nation) have not yet reached the place where we are significantly employing evidence-based policy.’

King said while changes in reactive strategies may have short-term effects on crime levels, their effectiveness will decrease in the long run.

He noted that just as the government had been able to use science and data to fight covid19, it could also do the same to fight crime.

Griffith’s social media post on October 31 was in response to a police release on October 27 which said they were “making it categorically clear” that recent, isolated reports of murders in some communities did not represent a “surge in murders,” as being reported.

The release did not specify where the surge in murders was being reported, but there have been social-media comments linking Griffith's absence to an increase in murders.

Griffith’s post also took aim at a newspaper report which featured comments by experts who, like King, said covid19 had contributed to the reduction in murders.