Misleading ad by Crime Stoppers

THE EDITOR: While I applaud the efforts of Crime Stoppers, there is the need to clear the air on an advertisement run by this organisation; an ad this writer finds to be at least misleading, or worse, insulting to our collective intelligence. This writer is not clear whether the ad in question is intentionally designed to mislead or whether the persons who prepared the ad were not adequately informed. To boldly state that “12 murders have been cleared and solved” is quite misleading. A word of advice for this organisation; a crime is not “cleared and solved” until there is a clear conviction for the said crime. A more appropriate statement would be that several (and here the organisation can provide numbers) arrests have been made relative to murders.

As anyone could attest, the conviction rate in TT is quite low, less than ten percent. Hence, it follows of the 12 arrests for murders, no more than two persons would be convicted. This means that approximately ten of the 12 murders referred to would remain unsolved. This is a sad indictment against a police service whose job it is to gather information to secure a conviction. It is even worse when numbers are thrown at us on a daily basis as to how many crimes were committed for the year, especially murders, and as the new year rolls in the numbers just start over from scratch. Makes one wonder about the methodologies employed by members of the police service to secure convictions. Yet members of the police service somehow manage to believe they are above criticisms; that “they are the law” as we so often hear. To further aggravate a situation, we have three CXC passes-police officers, who know little or nothing about the law playing prosecutors, coming up against lawyers who, by definition, have made a study of the law, passed bar exams etc; and whose profession it is to practise law. Then again, we have magistrates who pass out illegal sentences. Do we honestly expect a greater conviction rate? But I have long deviated from my original point, namely that Crime Stoppers should not intentionally or unintentionally mislead the public. Crime is a serious issue confronting us all. To mislead the public to gain our confidence is unto itself a crime.

RUDY CHATO PAUL, Sr
D’Abadie