A sudden mid-August upsurge in violence in eastern Port-of-Spain led to a first-ever political event: a meeting between Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar and opposition leader Keith Rowley to work out a consensual approach on anti-crime measures. It also triggered a police response that was harshly criticised by the legal profession as pushing the boundaries of acceptable procedures — and there was some irony in the fact that homicide figures for the first eight months of the year are actually much lower than a year earlier.
The event that prompted these responses was a spate of six killings within 24 hours in eastern Port-of-Spain in the second week of August. The authorities responded with two major police operations. The first — on 15 August in Laventille, Sea Lots, Beetham Gardens and Nelson and Duncan Streets — resulted in the arrest of 12 persons described as “major players” in criminal gang activities. The second, three days later, saw the deployment of 300 police officers and 100 soldiers of the Trinidad & Tobago Defence Force (TTDF) in Duncan, Nelson and George Streets, where 90 people were arrested.
The killings were attributed to a turf war between gangs, and police sources said that the Criminal Gang and Intelligence Unit was contemplating applying the 2011 Anti-Gang Act against some of the detainees. This piece of legislation has not been much used since the partial state of emergency of August last year.
On 22 August Persad-Bissessar and Rowley met to discuss anti-crime policy, accompanied by Attorney General Anand Ramlogan, ministers Christlyn Moore (justice), Clifton DeCoteau (national diversity) and Prakash Ramadhar (legal affairs), and three opposition legislators: senators Fitzgerald Hinds and Terrence Deyalsingh, and Port-of-Spain South MP Marlene McDonald.
Among the results of the meeting was opposition agreement to the deployment of a new rapid-response unit (for which special reserve police officers have been undergoing training since June); the acquisition of 300 new police cars; reviews of the procedure for the selection of the police commissioner and the Anti-Gang Act; and consideration of a partial abolition of jury trial for those charged with gun or drug offences.
For all this display of consensus, the government came in for a drubbing from the Law Association of Trinidad and Tobago (LATT) for the mass arrests that followed the mid-August killings. It said, “While the reports are conflicting as to the precise number of persons ‘detained’, it would appear that approximately 59 were released without charge and approximately 42 are still ‘detained’ [...] We remind the police that this country is governed by the rule of law and it has been long established that the police have no right of detention or arrest unless they have reasonable suspicion of someone having committed an offence or an offence is being committed in the presence of the police”.
The impact of the August killings on public opinion and political circles may suggest that violent crime has continued to rise. Available figures suggest the contrary. According to a tally by the Trinidad Express, from January to mid-August there had been 236 murders countrywide, 22% fewer than in the first eight months of 2012. The country’s homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants had previously fallen from a peak of 41 in 2008 (one of the highest in the hemisphere) to 26 in 2011. It then rose again to an estimated 32 in 2012. In absolute figures the monthly average in the first seven months of this year was 16% lower than that of last year as a whole.
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