A crime 'imposium'

PAOLO KERNAHAN

REGIONAL LEADERS gathered in Port of Spain to participate in a crime "imposium." This pappyshow was ideal for the Prime Minister to continue peddling the notion of violent crime as some generic regional phenomenon – it's happening everywhere!

Never mind our recent ranking ahead of Jamaica, Brazil, El Salvador and Guyana as having the sixth-highest crime rate on the planet by the independent NGO World Population Review.

It's perhaps appropriate then that, as the leading crime-ravaged society in the region, TT should host a conference meant to cobble together some sort of strategic approach to battling this scourge.

Of course, there will be no answers – no framework for a way forward, other than what individual regional leaders can fashion by dint of their intellect, enterprise and determination. In TT we are out of luck on that score.

Frankly, regional consensus on banning assault weapons is beyond embarrassing; I thought sidestepping real problems by inventing others was a uniquely Trini talent. Guess not.

Such workshops – and I attended more than my fair share as penance for a lifetime of sin – are generally intellectual masturbation in the extreme, typically culminating in cocktail parties at taxpayers' expense or on the dime of some international grant-funding initiative.

During the conference, the PM itemised exorbitant costs of treating the direct and collateral damage of crime – $170,000 to treat a head wound, $135,000 to treat a chest wound, and so on.

Not mentioned are the far greater costs ordinary citizens without the benefit of state security must bear – the actual loss of loved ones. Moreover, many productive members of society are felled by rapacious criminality – people who contribute hard-earned dollars through their sweat or the ingenuity of ideas and intellect that add to economic development, such as it is.

If violence is a public health emergency, then so are government ineptitude and corruption. Today's bloodshed is owed, in part, to state interventions indirectly financing the inexorable rise of murderous gang culture. For decades governments have poured hundreds of millions into the pockets of criminals under the guise of community development.

Political dalliances with "community leaders" coupled with socio-economic decay, a failed education system, growing inequality, porous borders for guns and drugs, and money laundering at all levels of society have all bred the supercriminal – murderers without conscience whose amoral code is influenced by rampant white-collar criminality and the naked injustice of what's good only for the goose, not the gander.

It isn't clear what commonality of solutions regional leaders expected to find. The headwaters of criminality in Jamaica likely differ from trends in St Lucia and certainly Trinidad. Policing, to an extent, must be shaped by an understanding of the beast it's supposed to bridle.

The Prime Minister recycled his flawed assertion that jettisoning Fitzgerald Hinds isn't the answer; salvation from lawlessness can't be reposed in one man. He referenced the revolving door in the Ministry of National Security under the People's Partnership and the PNM administration that preceded it.

People in high-stakes roles are expected to meet lofty performance standards, or at least demonstrate a glint of potential to deliver. In the normal world, leaders are fired and new ones are hired as often as it takes to find the right fit and the best results.

Luckily for Fitzgerald Hinds, TT politics exists outside of conventional norms – however, ordinary citizens must live and die in the real world. Hinds's incompetence and hubris are the means to our end.

The recent repetition by the hapless minister that he isn't responsible for the development of anti-crime plans is a window into a troubling room. His claim doesn't hold water, but even if we were to accept that, what does he have to say about the anti-crime plan of the newly-minted CoP? Has he read it?

Doesn't the National Security Ministry need an overarching strategic anti-crime plan in furtherance of any operational strategy laid out by the police service?

Forget all that. Just pull all actors from the different arms of national security into a room for the obligatory photo op to quiet murmurs of discomfort over brutal home invasions.

Expect nothing out of this charade that regional leaders seemed happy to oblige. The PM is imposing on a beleaguered people a man ill-suited to the job. The population must pay in blood and trauma the cost of political machinations.

When the Government, either through direct action or omission, contributes to violent crime, that's how you have a successful crime "imposium."