Stand your ground for what?

AUSTIN FIDO

WHEN I was a younger person, my school headmaster brought an orange to morning assembly. He had found the orange in a corridor. Choking back tears, he told us this carelessly misplaced fruit signified all that was awry in our young lives. Children who couldn’t keep an orange off the floor were skirting the margins of delinquency, he warned.

It was perhaps an excessively dramatic way to say “don’t litter,” but it was effective.

I was reminded of my theatrical old headmaster when Roger Alexander, TT’s Minister of Homeland Security, dimmed the lights at a post-cabinet briefing and narrated a horrific home invasion in the name of helping his Prime Minister sell her forthcoming “stand-your-ground” legislation.

I’m excited to see the campfire ghost story deployed as a legislative tactic, but for now, it’s the substance rather than the style of Alexander’s performance that warrants discussion.

The minister wanted to highlight the trauma inflicted on the victims of home invasions. The promised stand-your-ground law, supplemented by making it easier for citizens to legally acquire firearms, is the proposed solution.

As some commentators have noted, however, in Minister Alexander’s pantomime of grief and terror, it’s almost certain that anyone would already be justified in using deadly force to defend themself and their family.

Back in 2023, Jagdeo Singh – sufficiently respected by the government to be the current Speaker of the House – pointed out that TT’s existing laws allow for vigorous (even lethal) defence against an attack in one’s own home. In a piece published in a national newspaper (which is to say his opinion is not a secret), Singh argued for clarifying the interpretation of existing statutes for police and prosecutors, rather than introducing new legislation to merely duplicate what’s already settled law.

Assume the government is well aware of this. As such, we expect any proposed legislation to go beyond that which is already condoned by TT law.

The PM says she wants what Florida has, which we imagine means a near-copy of the Sunshine State’s stand-your-ground legislation, sometimes described as a “no-retreat” law by legal analysts.

In Florida, as in many places, one test for justifying self-defence is whether there’s opportunity to run away. The basic idea being that if you can retreat in the face of a threat, then you should. If you cannot, then you have the right to resist with force.

Stand-your-ground in Florida removed the issue of retreat. It’s a legal right to fight over flight.

So we can guess that’s what the government will import to TT: a Florida-style, “no-retreat” self-defence law. This raises a second question: why?

If you think Florida has a law worth copying, you presumably believe Florida gets some benefit from that law that you want to see in TT. What is that benefit?

Fewer murders? Surely not. A study published in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2016 found an eye-popping 24.4 per cent increase in the monthly homicide rate in Florida since the 2005 stand-your-ground law was enacted. The rate had previously been declining very modestly.

I’d be surprised if such a massive increase in homicides was directly attributable to stand-your-ground, but it does seem intuitive that the law encourages more murders and gunplay. You can’t tell people they’re legally entitled to take the law into their own hands, and then be surprised when they do just that. If your goal is reducing murders, stand-your-ground is not the right tool.

Does it have a deterrent effect on home invasions, at least? Data from the Florida Department of Health shows the statewide rate of robbery in 2005 was 57.4 per 100,000 of population; in 2023, the rate was 28.4 per 100,000. That’s a massive reduction.

So stand your ground does scare burglars and bandits straight? Maybe. A study by Graham Farrell from the University of Leeds School of Law noted an 80 per cent decline in residential burglary across the US since 1980. His analysis suggested the primary explanation for this was better home security systems: alarms and flashing lights, not homicidal homeowners.

Per stats from the TT Police Service, burglaries and break-ins are in decline in TT also. TTPS records show nearly 3,000 reported in 2013, and around 1,600 reported in 2024.

Statistics do not tell the whole story, but they are perhaps more substantive than a cabinet minister making loud noises in the dark. The government doubtless has its own data – now would be a good time to start sharing that data, rather than telling ghost stories.