Xmas callout

SEVEN months into her tenure, President Christine Kangaloo on Monday called out members of the Defence Force Reserves, formerly the Volunteer Defence Force, ahead of the Christmas season.

Such a move is not unprecedented and has even come to be regarded in military circles as routine ahead of the yuletide and Carnival periods.

But because such a callout is normally also occasioned by a natural disaster or a special event, such as this country’s hosting of the 2009 Summit of the Americas, and because the move came in the wake of shocking murders over the weekend, the country has taken notice.

If the President’s move was routine, the same cannot be said for the Prime Minister’s shift in tone on Tuesday in relation to the State’s efforts to fight crime.

“The State will redouble all efforts to curtail these violent outbursts, will hunt down and disarm the perpetrators and will make operational adjustments so that the state security services can act with despatch against the violent cohort of our national population,” he said on social media on Monday.

That such “operation adjustments” have been forthcoming has been signalled for some time now by Dr Rowley.

While there are questions about where the funding is to come from, Finance Minister Colm Imbert’s budget announcement of a trebling of police recruitment laid the groundwork for an escalation of policy measures.

Alongside the callout of forces and the Cabinet’s move this week to authorise the President to proclaim legislation that would widen the net of law enforcement officials sanctioned to bear arms, the State is showing ever greater willingness to deploy policy interventions in the fight.

Such interventions effectively represent an abandonment of the Cabinet’s longstanding attempt to cauterise itself from the nitty-gritty of policing policy. The Prime Minister’s convening of a high-level meeting of Cabinet and security heads on Tuesday, as well as his promise that the State would “hunt and disarm” criminals, as much as they appeared to be echoes of things past, represent the articulation of a new approach that, at long last, would seem to acknowledge that, no, the Government cannot wash its hands of this problem.

Is it too late?

Certainly Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar views this week’s developments as little more than an attempt to put a public-relations plaster on the crime situation.

But it must be noted that the PM recently joined with Ms Persad-Bissessar in addressing the issue of criminal vandalisation of sacred spaces in this country. And though substantial sticking points appear to have emerged in relation to the proposed government-opposition crime talks, those talks remain, in theory, on the agenda.

Will the country get more than a callout of troops this Christmas?