Erla's 'numbers' game

Paolo Kernahan

IMAGINE IF you could simply say you're slim because you haven't gained any more weight recently.

You can! If the Commissioner of Police scanned the landscape of criminality in TT and declared that criminals are on the back foot and crime is falling, then anything's possible.

The CoP delivered a puzzling interpretation of the statistics – murders are trending down: a "decrease in the increase" compared with the corresponding period in 2022, when they were ten per cent higher.

The porous proposition reads like this: if murders haven't gone up by ten per cent at this point then they've "fallen" by the same figure. This, the CoP suggests, is owed to interventions by the police.

As of the publication of an article on August 31, there was a shortfall of only one murder between this year's tally of killings and the figure for the same period last year.

Back in May, when the commissioner delivered an equally glowing assessment of the TTPS' performance, the detection rate for murders stood at a parsimonious 12 per cent. This was way off from Erla Harewood-Christopher's target of 30 per cent, by the way.

As it stands now, 65 people were charged with murder. Forty-seven out of that number were charged for killings that occurred this year, out of a figure of 392. That's also a detection rate of roughly 12 per cent.

So should we then interpret the detection rate remaining static as a decrease in the increase of detections, ergo fewer?

In addition to that paltry number is the glacial pace and anaemic efficacy of the justice system. This year six men walked free of the murder of Shivon "Tupac" Lewis in 2009. The accused spent 14 years on remand before their acquittal on account of unreliable witness testimony.

According to a study of the prosecution of capital cases in TT, 279 accused were tried for murder over the period 1998-2002. Only 58, or 20.8 per cent, were eventually found guilty of murder. This raises questions about the deterrent factor served up by the justice system.

Still, it's not the judiciary making grandiose claims of falling crime; it's the CoP.

Erla also said, "The incidents of crime were not evidence of police inaction."

Such semantics are primarily the concern of the TTPS and the commissioner, who must convince the public they aren't sleeping on the job. Ordinary folks who are being brutalised in their homes by increasingly violent criminals are interested only in those crimes; not evidence of police action they can't see.

It's also possible that crime has proliferated to the extent where strategies used by the police are now little more than an extinguisher to an inferno.

The commissioner's assertion that "the work of the police is constant and effective at deterring crime" is easily challenged – by criminals themselves. Within hours of that bold, yet brittle declaration in the Daily Bugle, bandits mobbed the hapless occupant of a vehicle that had run off the road near the Beetham landfill. A man was stabbed in that statistical inconvenience.

Contrary to the commissioner's claims of effective, yet undefined "police strategies," it's for us to reckon with the 2,000 robberies that victimised citizens from January to July. That figure, it must be assumed, captures only reported robberies. How many more went undisclosed for either fear of reprisals from double-dippin' criminals or a lack of confidence in the police service to act on them?

Erla's claim that murders are trending down isn't supported by the statistics.

Moreover, citizens are faced with more than the risk of being killed. Each day brings new car thefts, smash-and-grabs in parking lots, business raids, home invasions and roving gangs terrorising neighbourhoods.

The country is being torn apart by an active criminal siege like a carcass set upon by hyenas. No police roadblock-a-thon is going to change that. If that strategy was as effective as the police clearly believe it to be, this country would be as safe as cucumber at KFC.

Ultimately, Erla can't shoulder all the blame for what's happening under her watch. This mayhem and bloodshed is unfolding in front of the demonstrably ineffectual, yet uncharacteristically silent Fitzgerald Hinds.

His "performance" as Minister of National Security has got a resounding endorsement from the PM – a man whose own track record of performance is about as robust as single-ply toilet paper.

So when marauding bandits bent on blood force their way into your home, perhaps you can try telling them through the rag stuffed into your mouth, "You're not supposed to be here. You are a statistical anomaly."