Tasing disobedience

COLIN ROBINSON

caisott2@gmail.com

“You can run, but you can't hide!” David Small commands authority in the chair of Parliament’s oversight Committee on State Enterprises. Last November, he threatened to subpoena no-show EFCL executives. The Tranquil Old Boy from East Dry River had become my favourite senator, a champion repeatedly calling out abuse in special-purpose state companies at hearings.

Listening in the car to his contributions from the Independent bench to Tuesday’s debate on the politically contested anti-gang legislation, his opening was cant: “Crime is out of control in Trinidad & Tobago.”

“We’re experiencing diminishing returns from our expenditure on the national security architecture,” the respected energy and economic development expert analysed. Dealing with crime requires a mix of strategies and a holistic approach, he kept repeating; not just the admittedly “draconian” measures in the bill. “Where the bill calls for expanded powers of the police…I understand the concerns…Depending on where you are and where you sit, this bill is not proportional.”

Small seemed to get it (at least better than the MP for Arima) as he related recognising the uniforms in the latest school-fight video. “It hurt. Because I am seeing young people, clearly misguided, clearly not understanding what they are doing, getting themselves involved in, and lacking direction. And I’m not sure how to fix it. I'm not sure how to fix it. … Too many of these young people now don’t seem to understand the difference between right and wrong, and there’s a fundamental breakdown or complete lack of respect for authority in this country. … Some of these so-called gang members are just human beings searching for social interaction. They feel ostracised by the society that they live in. … The gang leader in the area is somebody that, you know, makes me feel like a person…he gives me the opportunity to have a few dollars in my pocket.”

How do we “fix it”? What gets in the way of policy innovation on the issues that matter most, like crime and violence? It’s a question that’s clearly been on my mind all month. What keeps us away from stupidly simple ideas? Like accepting it can never be the ’70s again. Giving boys dolls. Criminal justice institutions treating people with dignity, so they aren’t breeding a broad rage and resentment at the law they are supposed to inculcate respect for.

I’ve been thrilled to receive e-mail from Newsday readers sharing answers. I’ve been reminded that it takes a village to raise a bandit. I received a monograph of research Dylan Kerrigan and others did on procedural justice locally for the Judiciary’s Judicial Education Institute (JEI).

Derek Chadee’s UWI launch this week of a big study on crime and victimisation raised the question again. The event had all those pointless protocols and irrelevant bios, though I escaped the vote of thanks. Why, despite incredible innovativeness in our culture (and some relatively smart-thinking police in the room), does criminal justice remain so ineffective, one workgroup asked? Their answer: Leaders are invested in the status quo.

Mine is different: We’re obsessed with “authority” as a solution. The authority of older, simpler times. Heteronormative authority that raises boys to be masculine. The authoritarianism of institutions. “What they do in Singapore” has been coming up all week.

I stopped listening to the Parliament Radio broadcast when I got home. A place where, like the Senator, I no longer sleep peacefully, something, like him, I do only in beds outside of TT. “My brain suddenly relaxes immediately as the aircraft takes off out of Piarco,” he had lamented.

I was surprised to read Wednesday’s news reports of Small’s speech. I turned to the session’s Youtube on Parlview in puzzlement.

As he moved to wind up, the Senator recounted his pregnant supermarket worker’s story of a 7:30am wrestle with two boys in a maxi for her purse. And all his reasoning and empathy and solution-seeking just vanished. He erupted: “The police should have tasers. Because the option for the police now is to stand and take the verbal abuse or use lethal force. I have had the privilege of being in other places and there’s public disturbances, and the instant you respond back to a police officer, you are tased…There’s no discussion.”

I recalled myself reaching for the belt the year I parented my little brother. Because I couldn’t imagine any other solution. Are Hanif and David and fathers and boyfriends and politicians and I reaching for simply stupid ideas as desperately and recklessly as the young men who provoke our reaching?

Bandits’ thinking is evolving faster than ours, Sen. Small observed.

And we keep turning to the same big blunt tools of authority and violence. Slavery and plantation required respectability and obedience from people they insistently demeaned and devalued. And whipped. I watch education, the work economy, the burgeoning security economy, do something remarkably similar. I watch the common currency of licks in the transactions between partners, and parents and children. I watch students sharing licks outside schools that make them failures. And I’m puzzled at our puzzlement.

Everything tells me that authority is not the solution to what ails us. It is our problem.