Fence building has failed

THE EDITOR: In TT, despite intense and dedicated police efforts to stem criminal activity, emboldened lawbreakers pose an existential threat to the State.

The country has "real" lawbreakers. Homes are invaded, witnesses slaughtered, police officers murdered, and now, with society’s perception that lawlessness has reached its zenith, extortionists have appeared.

This situation arises from a misguided six-decade belief that criminal activity can be controlled by a "fence," a construct that would deter lawbreakers and isolate criminal activity to a controllable corner of society.

In the 1970s, a wage payment fence was constructed. At that time paymasters arrived at depressed area projects and paid workers in cash. Bandits saw an opening. They robbed paymasters. Instead of eliminating the threat to paymasters, government erected a fence – wage payment was changed from cash to check.

A fence was erected, but the bandits remained, proliferating and gravitating to home invasions, causing homeowners to spend billions of dollars constructing burglar-bar fences to protect themselves.

And yet, no one feels safe, no one feels protected, thus burglar bars are now reinforced with security lights, dogs and cameras.

The killing of witnesses has become the new "normal." Yet without witnesses the judicial system cannot effectively function.

Thousands of lawbreakers go unpunished, and to describe witnesses who refuse to co-operate with police as unpatriotic is to misunderstand the dire threat witnesses face and the need to address that threat.

Like the erection of a paymaster’s fence, the government, instead of eliminating the witness-killer threat, chose to erect a fence – a witness protection programme.

Would the need for a witness protection programme arise if, at its inception, the threat to witnesses had been eliminated? Surely there was a time when the first witness was killed.

Instead of calling upon the government to eliminate extortion, Fazir Khan, president of the Joint Consultative Council (JCC), has proposed the installation of “…soldiers at construction sites to safeguard contractors and their employees…amid concerns that contractors are facing extortion from criminal elements which has led to death threats to contractors and has hampered work” (Loop News, Oct 9).

A call for soldiers at construction sites is a consequential misunderstanding of human motivation in pursuit of criminal activities.

For example, when the first paymaster was robbed, the government, instead of erecting a wage-payment-by-check fence, should have eliminated the robbers and ended paymaster robbery. That would have sent an unambiguous message to aspiring robbers – robbing paymasters does not pay.

Randy Burroughs was a tainted police commissioner, but he understood the criminal mind. His policy was: you break the law; we break the law. It is that kind of "get the criminal no matter what it takes attitude" that is required today to bring what Prime Minister Rowley described as “a dramatic escalation in violent crime” to a manageable level.

And so now, as Shadow might have asked, what is the solution? The burglar bars are there, the witness protection programme is there, the steel bars, the lights, the vicious dogs, the cameras are there, and still we live in fear.

With "water more than flour," we have become desperate, and desperate times call for desperate measures.

Fencing off the lawbreaker has failed. We have burglar bars, but bandits still invade homes. We have a witness protection programme, but witnesses are still being slaughtered.

And if a combined soldier-police fence is erected to protect contractors on major construction projects from extortionists, who will protect contractors on minor construction projects?

Emboldened extortionists pose an existential threat to the security of TT, and the construction of an army-police fence to protect contractors will not end that threat.

Just as it took extra medical efforts to bring the covid19 crisis to a manageable level, so too must we consider extra judicial methods to bring “brazenness, bold-facedness and impunity” to an end.

Instead of constructing a police-army fence, we must create police-army units whose mission will be to send a clear and unambiguous message to extortionists: whatever the price, whether in blood or treasure, extortion, along with its aspirants, will be eliminated – period.

EDMUND NARINE

via e-mail