Telegraphing wrong signals to criminals

THE EDITOR: Please allow me space to convey my disappointment on several aspects of the PM’s address to the nation on crime (Newsday July 29, p 13). The PM started off on the wrong footing at the very beginning by focussing pointedly on “unacceptable levels of murders” and deliberately avoided an equal emphasis on the kidnapping menace — a national disgrace. Kidnapping is ravaging our cosmopolitanism by inducing stress, trauma, psychotic fears on the weak and defenseless and driving the flight of the critical mass of our entrepreneurs and our human capital to safer climes. Listening to the address I expected the PM to accord the kidnapping crime being perpetrated with impunity against TT humanity including the babies and innocent, a high priority and profile to assuage our fears and provide hope. But this did not appear to be politically correct.

Since when are the criminals/kidnappers stronger, better equipped and more organised than the 10,000 plus members of the Protective Services? This is a deliberate myth. The current National Security budget is in excess of $2billion with more to come from Minister Joseph. There is an accumulated policing infrastructure from umpteenth budgetary allocations and a duplicated, ace crime-fighting unit headed by another regimental Brigadier Joseph and there is no relief from lawlessness in sight. Only talk and no walk! We cannot interdict criminals on land but we are intensifying policing efforts on sea. The poison pen of the late Patrick Chokolingo and the comic inventiveness of the late Chanka Maharaj would have had a field day. Criminals will continue to infringe the laws and disregard lack lustre policing once they can reasonably foresee that they will not be caught. It is simple as that.

Politicians at times unwittingly and at times deliberately through their foolish pronouncements as well as by their silent inaction provide fodder for criminals to prosecute their nefarious trade in human cargo and banditry. who said kidnappings were staged? The correlation among the exogenous factors of unemployment, irrelevant schooling, hopelessness and crime has not been clearly established. What of the endogenous factors such as the psychological ease, comfort, lack of “the compunction visitings of nature” with which the current underworld is using superior aggression and weaponry to relieve their hapless victims of their hard-earned property with impunity? The youths of the rural heartland live daily under the strains and stresses of unemployment, no easy access to skills training, no URP/CEPEP and suffer in silence. There are no state contingency response programmes to train, employ or provide hope. They still do not take up arms against a sea of troubles. We can only solve a problem when we diagnose it accurately and not exploit and use crime-related occasions to find jobs for the boys.

How will we determine and enroll “the vulnerable members in our communities?” Will “community leaders” select them? Will they be the same ones who were defended by Minister Rowley and his poodle in Parliament in the COSTAATT matter? Must the rural young, restless and hopeless become criminals/drug pushers to get attention as well? The young pushers of Frederick Settlement were left with hopelessness to be wiped by the gallows with no counselling for their parents. In those proposed “month modules” please teach actual and potential criminals, if you can locate them, inter alia, the relationship between law and societal survival, the sanctity of human life especially of babies, the Hindu doctrine of Karma and Equilibrium, Hell and Damnation with the help of Pastor Dottin as well as how not to live on kidnapping ransoms, stealing other people’s property and the parasitic survival of the physically strongest/most aggressive as evidence of animalism in the wild.

STEPHEN KANGAL
Caroni