Getting crime messaging wrong

The leader of our Opposition party, Mrs Kamla Persad-Bissessar, indicated her policy on crime management at a public meeting last week. It chimed in with a lot of the population who believe that you fight fire with fire, literally, and specifically in relation to the use of firearms. Her heated comments about increasing access to firearms reignited the thorny debate about how to deal with our ever-escalating crime problem.

Crime is probably, together with the cost of living, the main causes of concern for Trinidadians, Tobagonians might currently have more pressing issues to preoccupy them.

On the bigger island we all feel less safe, and the killings and aggressions come closer to home every day. In my quiet and seemingly safe area, a relatively newly opened food mart has been raided at least three or four times, which is worrying. We have a neighbourhood group chat dedicated to crime alerts, which is very active, spotting potential crimes and springing into evasive action. Yet, we still enjoy a certain quality of life that allows us to walk our dogs, seek entertainment, and drive around the capital and highways and byways in relative safety all hours of the day, although more cautiously at night.

We have had to learn how to protect ourselves and to look after our property, as we would do in a big city, since the acts of violence seem to be getting extreme, but the truth is that it is still not out of control. We know that it is only a small number of younger people who are making life such a trial for the rest of us. They may or may not belong to gangs and, on the face of it, that does not represent an insoluble problem, so why can’t we fix it?

It would be safe to say that criminality is not just where we see it with our eyes or feel a blow on our bodies, but where we also know it to be hidden. This country is corrupt through and through, so much so that too many people do not know any more what is right or wrong, what is acceptable or kind. I put that idea to a friend who underscored it by referring to epigenetics, which is how behaviour and environment can change the way our genes work without fundamentally changing our DNA sequence, so that with time we begin to adapt to how things around us work, since we are primed for survival. It is reassuring to know that epigenetic changes are reversible so there is the chance that if we could operate a better society, we could have better people.

Unfortunately, there is little chance of that if our leaders undervalue gentleness in language and spirit and advocate violence and retribution. The response to our reported Opposition leader’s fiery encouragement to use guns aggressively to protect ourselves drew a lot of flak, which was itself encouraging. It means a lot of the public see the danger in that style of political rhetoric and in increased gun ownership. We were also rightly reminded that the use of guns is restricted by law. There are legal consequences for killing a man in your home, even if he was there illegally and the gun belonged to you. Moreover, the chance exists that a gun in the house might be used by someone other than the owner.

What everybody agrees with is the fact that we are in an almighty mess which we can only partly blame on our ex-colonial masters. The situation did not develop overnight, including the awful bureaucracy we are routinely subjected to. But even there, the possibility for change is evident. Recently I lost my driver’s licence and was surprised that reissuing it was completed within an hour. An even better experience was getting my electronic birth certificate, which took all of 10 minutes. Corruption in the licensing office was legend but as systems are streamlined backhanders become less possible, and similarly in the department of legal affairs, and also immigration. I remember a clerk in immigration once persistently attempting to block me and only afterwards realising that it might have been an invitation to bribe him. Fortunately, he failed to thwart me.

White collar crime is worse in some ways than violent crime because it targets all of us and stymies the economy. The list of documents insurers now require for certain policies is jaw-droppingly long and intrusive. Almost any bank transaction is so convoluted that you need to be extremely smart and focused to get through in one go, and even then you need assistance and much patience. Similarly, with all the rules governing company directorships and in seeking sponsorship. Now company directors must have a PIN number, like a birth certificate, and provide very private information and several forms of ID, plus each director must be photographed holding the ID – I guess in case everything is fake. The hurdles grow daily in complexity, yet the corruption outstrips them. It heralds the uselessness of all those measures. I wonder what weapon could be used to “light up” all that paper?