Criminals still ahead

Lovell, along with Sean “Gambo” Vincent, Brent “Small Bren” Danglade, Richard Kirton, and Jason Joseph were all freed when the State’s main witness failed to appear. That witness, Joel “Footy” Phillip, had been accused with the others of kidnapping 30-year-old schoolteacher Dennis Jodhan in December, 2002. Mr Jodhan was later killed. Lovell, Vincent, and Danglade are to be tried for his murder next week — but Phillip is also the main witness in that case.

Phillip walked out of police protective custody seven months ago, and has not been found since. The authorities don’t know if he’s in the country or dead.

On learning what had transpired, Justice Lalla suggested that the Director of Public Prosecutions might in future want to consider giving immunity to witnesses on terms that will allow prosecution if they renege on their promise. “It seems that enough is not being done,” said Justice Lalla, in a masterpiece of understatement.

What makes this incident especially scandalous is that the authorities had dubbed Lovell as “TT’s most wanted man”. This Lovell may or may not have been — the main purpose of that labelling was to show that the forces of law and order were making headway against crime. But the fact that the State lost its main witness, and on top of that built its entire case around his testimony, demonstrates just how far the police and the prosecution are from triumphing over criminals.

In this failure, it has now become standard practice by police spokesmen and the Minister of National Security to put part of the blame on citizens (the other parts being international crime, poor parenting, and social norms). So the unwillingness of individuals to come forward as witnesses has been cited as one of the reasons for the low crime detection rate.

Yet the simple fact is that the authorities cannot expect citizens to be responsible unless the police are responsible first. People would be willing to do their civic duty if they had a reasonable expectation that doing so would not expose them to unreasonable danger. Yet, on every hand, citizens see that criminals have utter contempt for police, committing robberies and even murder in broad daylight, in complete confidence that blimps and Eyes in the Sky and new police vehicles are unlikely to lead to arrest. On top of that, citizens themselves lack confidence in the police, given the common experience of reporting a crime and meeting with a response that is either slow or non-existent.

So the Catch-22 here is that witnesses will not come forward until the fight against crime is more effective, and the fight against crime cannot become effective as long as law enforcement depends on witnesses. What this points out, among other things, is the need to improve the forensic capacities of the Police Service. The police must acquire the investigative skills that would allow the State to prosecute on the basis of ballistic, fingerprint, and DNA evidence, rather than eyewitness testimony.

Beyond all this, however, is the need to tackle the long — and medium-term causes of crime. The long term has to do with issues like poverty and education, and such causes, by definition, take time to fix. But what about the medium term? What has been done to clean up the URP, to find the new bosses of the drug trade, to discover how so many guns are entering the country? On these matters, the authorities appear to be making no headway at all.