What strategic issues?

We have just one question for Mr Joseph: how stupid does he think the people of Trinidad and Tobago are?

Even the meanest intelligence knows that a drop in the murder rate in a single month is completely meaningless. And anyone with a basic grounding in statistics knows that, for any given phenomena, a high in one cycle is almost invariably followed by a low in the next. What matters is not the individual high or low, but the average over a statistically significant period. We are now 133 days into 2006. The murder rate, at press time, stands at 147. This is more than one per day. That has not changed in the past three years, save in the last two months of 2005, when the rate rose to over two per day.

It is perhaps a sign of Mr Joseph’s political desperation that he would attempt to use the drop in murders in April to trumpet triumph. Perhaps he hoped that, when the murder rate went up again, people would remember his trumpeting and ignore the rather louder sound of gunfire. But, no matter how loud his propaganda, the National Security Minister cannot drown out the sound of failure.

The PNM assumed office in 2001. It was in that year that the murder rate started to rise to record levels, reaching its one-a-day average early in 2002. Prime Minister Patrick Manning then declared that the murder spree was only temporary. The Government went on a spending spree, buying Eyes-in-the-Sky with no eyes, blimps with unsuitable equipment, and yet another blimp which has managed to reduce nothing save people’s sleep-time as it flies noisily overhead.

Foreign crime consultants were brought in and, by all reports, their recommendations adopted. Now we have British police officers on the ground, and we are waiting to see if they will make a difference.

It is not that we expect these anti-crime measures to have immediate impact. But we certainly do think that, after three years, citizens should have seen some results — if, that is, the Government’s measures were based on rigorous analysis and executed with political will. But, judging from the continued murder rate, it is clear that the Government has failed on one or both fronts.

Since the Government, with typical lack of transparency, has refused to enlighten citizens on its strategy (a completely different matter from revealing specific plans), we can only speculate that its failure is rooted in a lack of political courage. We say this because the Government has consulted enough experts and has enough money to carry out their recommendations. But, given that the Manning administration has more than once stated its willingness to negotiate with crime leaders, and given that the Government has taken no substantive action to clean up the Unemployment Relief Project (URP), it seems likely that the Government, for all its grand show, is still pussyfooting on crime.

After all, it has now become clear that a significant percentage of these murders are linked to the URP. And it is the Government’s action on that front which will serve as the barometer on how serious — or not — the PNM administration really is about stopping murders in Trinidad and Tobago.