‘Misleading,’ minister?

On Friday, National Security Minister Fitzgerald Hinds pronounced a video of terrified schoolchildren – face down on the floor, being urged to keep quiet by their teacher while gunshots are heard in the background – “quite misleading.”

In his Facebook post, Mr Hinds declared: “The actual shooting took place about 200 metres away.”

The ten-minute gun battle, he acknowledged, was the kind of incident that happens so often that the school, Rose Hill RC Primary School in Laventille, had instituted this drill as a safety response.

The incident happened last Monday. The school is due to reopen today after a week of online teaching.

The Education Ministry responded by assigning a dedicated school social worker to supplement the school’s guidance counsellor in providing “support” to the school’s students and teachers.

Presumably Mr Hinds can be so cavalier because he and the police have been aware of the flare-up in gang violence in east Port of Spain since the beginning of the year.

But assessing the distance from where the gun battle happened is just armchair analysis, and dismissing the danger is unrealistic as well as tone-deaf.

Teachers and children in a school built with breeze blocks can’t have Mr Hinds’ casual, tone-deaf certainty – given modern high-powered weapons, 200 metres is no distance – and they cannot depend on regular police patrols to limit the potential for gang warfare in broad daylight.

If a teacher hadn’t captured the terror of the moment – the children frozen between smiling for the camera and wide-eyed fear – and shared the clip with large portions of the country, after it went viral, would the police be moving with such alacrity – or at all – to increase static patrols in the area around the school?

Education Minister Dr Nyan Gadsby-Dolly admitted the children at Rose Hill RC are used to hearing gunshots, but October 31 was exceptional.

But how many bullets must be fired near a school, or for that matter, in any public place, before an alarm is rung to engage the police?

Should public outrage and worry be needed to push the National Security Ministry to secure schools in part of the capital city?

Do children cowering under their desks feel sure that adults and authority figures are doing their best to keep them safe? This time, by sheer luck, none of them was hit by a bullet, but the chances are that all of them are suffering from psychological trauma.

East Port of Spain cannot simply be abandoned to trigger-happy gangs.

For these innocents preparing to inherit tomorrow, the Education Minister must declare: Not here, not longer.

The National Security Minister must decide: No more. And the Police Commissioner must roster his officers to protect and serve the children of east Port of Spain to defend their right to be educated safely and to grow up without fear.