Kidnapping now taken seriously

To help achieve this end, the Government has set up a 24-hour coordinating centre, sent senior officers for overseas training, and established links with law enforcement agencies in the United Kingdom and the United States. However, it is unfortunate that, in informing the country about these initiatives through its Information Division programme, the Government claims that the measures are already bearing fruit — an assertion which the statistics show to be manifestly untrue.

The latest initiative has been taken by the US embassy, which organised an anti-kidnapping seminar to be conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in an attempt to improve the detection work of local police officers. On the face of it, it seems peculiar that so much effort has to be put into stamping out a crime which is relatively easy to detect. We have asked before what the particular obstacles are, given that ransom must be collected by the kidnappers. Why have the police not been able to mount sting operations or even to trace the calls made by the kidnappers?

If this is a matter of technology, then surely a government that is able to afford a 360-degree radar system and a $40 million blimp can invest in equipment to track cell-phone calls and the containers that ransom money is put in. Yet it isn’t even necessary to wait for such high technology. What about the traditional crime-detection method of marked bills?

No answers have been forthcoming. It may be, however, that the police have already tried all or some of these approaches, and been outwitted by the kidnappers. This seems unlikely, but we suppose it is possible. However, if this is the case, then it strongly implies police involvement in the kidnapping industry — an allegation that has surfaced continually in respect to this particular crime. If this is so, then training officers in anti-kidnapping techniques will have only limited impact.

Still, at this stage, even a limited impact would be progress. The FBI seminar began almost a week after 15-year-old Anthony Saroop was snatched on the street. Saroop’s mother is a cashier in a racing pool and a single mother of four — yet the kidnappers have been demanding a ransom of $8 million. This may well indicate that kidnapping, although it had started off as a crime carried out by persons with particular connections and organisational skills, has now become a free-for-all among the criminal class. It appears that criminals have started holding almost anyone for ransom, and the victims are no longer exclusively well-to-do.

The social costs of this kind of crime are just as pernicious as that of continual murders. But, whereas the rising murder rate creates insecurity mostly in the urban centres in and around Port-of-Spain, kidnapping is more widespread and, since the business class has begun to emigrate or to limit their activities because of it, kidnapping has economic and social effects which will eventually affect the entire populace. So, unless the government can eradicate this crime in the very near future, kidnapping may well become a key factor in hastening the failure of the state of Trinidad and Tobago.