Government cop-outs

Speaking at the 39th annual PNM conference of the Diego Martin West constituency on Sunday, National Security Minister Martin Joseph asserted that Trinidad’s location between the cocaine producing countries of South America and the cocaine consuming countries of North America was a key factor in the rising crime rate. On Friday, speaking at a similar party function in East Morvant, Mr Joseph slammed parents who "shirked their responsibilities" for their children’s safety and security.

There are, however, some fundamental flaws with Mr Joseph’s arguments. In the first place, the location of Trinidad and Tobago has not changed in the past several thousand years. It has not even changed within the past five years, but it is in that time period that the murder rate began to rise to astronomical heights and kidnappings became an established feature on the crime front. In fact, between 1995 and 1999, the murder rate actually went down, from 122 to 106 to 101 to 98 to 93. Then, in 2000, it jumped to 120, and hasn’t looked back since. At the present rate, this country will see a murder rate of almost 350 by December 31, 2005. So location cannot be the cause, since the drug routes have been the same for the past 25 years.

In the second place, parenting practices in this society have not, as far as we know, changed within the past few years. Mr Joseph suggests that the economic downturn of the 1980s caused many parents to migrate, leaving children in the hands of grandparents and other relatives. This argument is, however, quite specious. First, it means that most of the criminals today have parents who went overseas - not an argument, we suspect, that would be borne out by any empirical study which Mr Joseph, we further suspect, does not possess.

Secondly, the argument assumes that grandparents and other relatives are less able than parents to bring up children, which is debatable. But Mr Joseph went further, praising himself for protecting his own children from crime by curbing their social activities — the implication being that it is a lack of a parental iron hand that causes youngsters to become criminals or victims of crime. The fact that Mr Joseph and his family exist in a middle-class environment and that his own prominence provides extra security are overlooked, although these are far more pertinent to his children’s safety and purported good behaviour.

What is notably absent from the Government’s utterances is any acknowledgement that its own policies, after 40 years of running the country with just two stints out of office, may also be significant causes of the present situation. How did the Junior Secondary schools and a deficient education system help produce the present crop of criminals? How did the spendthrift policies of the PNM regime during the first oil boom foster the consumer mentality that increased the gap between the haves and have-nots? How did the make-work programmes of DEWD and LID and all its other titles create the dependency syndrome that underlies criminal behaviour?

Only when the Manning administration tackles these hard questions will they be able to deal effectively with crime. Trying to blame parents, geography, and globalisation are just cop-outs.