Williams: Freeze on violence in Enterprise

Speaking at a news conference at the Ministry of National Security, Port-of-Spain, Williams said the joint police and army intervention has created an “overwhelming presence” in the area. “Central Division has had 13 murders within the month of March and many of those have occurred in Enterprise,” Williams said.

“We believe that all these murders are based on the clash been two gangs. We will continue that overwhelming presence throughout Enterprise. That level of presence, we believe, will allow us to freeze the violence in Enterprise.” Saying there have been some 30 murders in March within the three major police divisions, Northern, Central and Western, some of which occurred within the last ten days, Williams said: “There is an obvious and clear situation of clashes between different gangs at different locations causing the violence to take place. In some instances, like last night (Thursday), people who were in the vicinity of targets turned out to be victims of the indiscriminate shootings by gang members.” Williams, however, lamented that this country is perhaps the only country in the region in which legislation was not on the books to tackle gangs. “We have been increasing our efforts. But critical to us is to have dedicated legislation to deal with gangs. That discussion seems to be lost in the public domain because we (police) cannot enforce the gang laws.”