Rowley laments heinous crimes, high cost of national security

THE Prime Minister expressed his revulsion at certain heinous crimes taking place in this country, and suggested criminality largely arose in the home.

Dr Rowley was speaking at the post-Cabinet briefing at Whitehall, Port of Spain, on July 25.

Newsday asked if he had a think-tank to be informed of TT’s criminological landscape, to which he offered his insights into the causes of crime.

“It (crime) starts in the home. Then it gets into the community. And it gets out there as a nation.

“It starts in the home! Because every one of those killers has parents, they have brothers, they have sisters, they have neighbours, they have teachers. Eh?! Then they have criminal friends!

“It is a societal problem, that we are trying to deal with governmentally. Right?!”

He said society thought the Government by itself should fix this state of affairs.

“It takes more than that. When you look at the amount of resources that the Government has made available to this problem and the problem is so intractable, it should let you know.”

“I am sure there are people who think that if I walk off this job tomorrow and you (Newsday reporter) come and become the prime minister the problem will be solved.

“It won’t go so. It don’t go so. Because I could tell you I have a good idea how much effort the nation has put out in trying to deal with the criminal element and it’s not a good idea.”

He said a couple of years ago the national security budget had become the highest allocation of the national budget.

“We are buying cars for the police. How many millions of dollars?

“I was just talking to the Commissioner of Police (Erla Harewood-Christopher) a couple days ago and she told me the number of police cars parked up in Wallerfield.

“I had to ask her, ‘Eh? What number?’ Must be a thousand.”

Recalling that when he ruined his shoes playing football as a boy he then had to go barefoot, Rowley said he now has to keep supplying the police with replenishment cars and not deny them what they need.

Saying TT already has more police officers than the global average, he asked if the country was getting value from them.

“Then when you come to the prison, it is a similar story.

“You have to manage the prisoners maybe more than you are managing the criminals outside. The prisoners are using modern technology in a variety of ways including calling in their own ‘air force’ to drop firearms into the prison. That wasn’t happening 30 years ago. There was no drone to do that.

“Nowadays you have to manage inside the prison and the air above the prison. So the thing is changing all the time, and you just have to engage and engage and engage, to bring about some acceptable level of public safety and security.”

Rowley said the criminal element was “constantly evolving” as he likened it to an amoeba, an amorphous, blob-like, single-cell creature which puts out tentacles in any direction.

Reflecting on murderous minds behind the horrific crimes reported regularly, he said, “You ask yourself how do you think that up? And where is your humanity when you do that?”

He lamented the recent discovery of an old man found murdered in his home with his hands bound behind his back.

“A 74 year old man, for God’s sake!”

He said the perpetrator was likely to be an able-bodied adult who could have sought a job but instead chose to kill the man for his “$10.”

“That is where we are,” Rowley reflected.

“What kind of person is reared by the community, for whom the killing of a senior citizen is a normal thing to get a dollar? What is that?”

Newsday asked if the community needed some kind of social engineering, for individuals to stop making awful choices in their lives.

“Something is going wrong. And not just today, not since I’ve been prime minister. Something has been going wrong for quite some time. “

He said that in representing people, his favourite thing was to visit constituency primary schools and see the innocence of youngsters.

“You see such great promise in them.

“I walk away from there sometimes thinking what happens to them when they get to 17 or 18, 19, 20. Some of them end up doing some terrible things.

“I had reason at one time to be looking at the work of the social worker who works in the primary school and all that glitters is not gold.

“Some of those primary-school children live in conditions that are absolutely horrendous.”

These situations are known to social workers, he said.

“There are difficult situations there. Sometimes the difficulty, if you are not careful, can overwhelm you.”

Rowley gave an update on the initiative of social intervention to help hot-spot communities, to start in about eight weeks.

“It is all-encompassing, in terms of activities. It is activity-oriented and problem-solving.

“Where the community has an irritant problem that might be physical, you could try to get it done, get it out of the way.”

The programme would create activities to guide young people and not-so-young people to spend their time in “positive activities”, he explained.