Fighting crime

Briefly, I propose nine areas of concern as contained in my recent address to the Trinidad and Tobago Chamber of Commerce.

1. Three years ago, as Opposition Leader, Dr Keith Rowley called for a special office __ a Government Accounting Office (GAO) to help oversee public expenditure. In today’s era of oversized greed, vanity expenditures and financial waste, this remains a useful idea.

2. In the PNM Manifesto, and as major architect of that manifesto, the Hon Minister of Finance proposed a Police Management Board and a Police Inspectorate.

Dr Rowley had also called for a performance audit of the Police Service. The constitutional powers given to the Police Commissioner to manage the Police Service do not seem to be working well. The Police Service Commission is now a constitutional weakling, seemingly unable to effectively execute its expensive oversight authority. Now is the time for the government to take the bull by its horns, stop the quibbling and tinkering with the Police Service, conduct the performance audit, set up a special task force for quickened delivery, and embark on comprehensive police service reforms. Time is fast running out. Part of the answer might well reside in establishing the Police Management Board and Police Inspectorate.

There are constitutional and operational limits to what the government can do with crime and justice. It must however use the powers it has.

3. The Judiciary and the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, as independent as they are, need a break-through. Trial delays, expensive justice and public frustration cannot continue so. This is a time when public officers particularly must work beyond the call of ordinary duty. With a badly under- staffed DPP office and a rising package of serious allegations of state corruption and white collar crimes, it is time to appoint a small battery of Special Prosecutors to help do the job and rebuild public confidence in our system of justice.

We cannot just make serious allegations and leave them hanging so.

4. Decentralise the Police Service.

Include this in the current reforms in local government, so as to energise community policing within the regional corporations and fast-track community breaches with a set of trained lay magistrates.

5. Alongside this plan to empower localised community policing, establish at each police station a Citizen Public Safety Alliance to support police work.

6. The Prison and especially Remand Yard conditions remain a constitutional and human rights’ nightmare that urgently requires government attention. A prison disaster is in the making. I have witnessed the conditions and met the inmates.

7. Crime and education are torturously connected. The evidence shows that a conservative estimate of 30% of students entering secondary school end up as drop-outs, or leaving with one, two or no passes, no career or occupational goals in mind, and largely entering drug addiction and trafficking, gangs, stealing, no respect for private property and even into gang and robbery-driven murders.

8. Two of the 14 recommendations in my new book, Inequality, Crime and Education: Removing the Masks are (1) “Best-Fit” teachers, that is, appoint appropriately- trained teachers into the hot spot or delinquency- affected schools.

Training all teachers as is if they are all going into similar schools is a “bad-fit” approach, eventually frustrating teachers, students and school performance. (2) A driving force behind youth crime is ‘career blindness,’ that is, not having career or occupational goals, especially along the East-West corridor. We recommended the establishment of 30 Career Empowerment Centres with multi-sectoral support from government, business and labour.

9. Too many of our communities are now fragmented, crime ridden and filled with wayward youths.

Business has fled. But business should help lead the way in community reconstruction.

As a start, there should be a courageous partnership between government, business and labour to establish in seven such depressed communities an appropriate business to help bring hope, employment and self-respect to its inhabitants.