The roots of crime

Crime pays in our country.

From violent blue collar crime to sophisticated white collar corruption and fraud, crime pays and pays well. That is why we have so much crime, in so many areas of our lives. Crime pays because criminals, from bankers to bandits (same people you may acknowledge!) know that they will not be caught or prosecuted or punished for the crimes they commit.

While I agree that we must fight the obviously horrendous shootings and murders with full force, we totally delude ourselves if we think that we can suppress violence for long by merely pruning the nettle that stings us. Without accepting that we must, simultaneously if not in advance of the frontal attacks, identify and eliminate the root causes of crime through our society, we cannot get to the roots of crime. And those roots run deep, through communities of the rich and powerful, down through the communities of the poor and dispossessed.

But how do we find those roots, far less destroy them? Crime has become so much a part of us that we know longer consider many of our observations as witness to crimes. Look at some: In 1987 we are sitting in an office where a company needs to rebuild a fire damaged retail business.

The owners are complaining that a new staircase “takes up sales room”. The architect tells them that Town & Country Planning Division and Fire Services will not approve the plans for construction without that staircase, and it must be included. The owners tell the architect “we will get the drawings approved”, and they did! Early in 1987, I took Firearms User Certificates for renewal at the St James Police Station. These were for construction of “cartridge- fired” tools. A very unpleasant and overweight sergeant kept me waiting, then when I entered his office he shoved a newspaper at me, saying, “You see this? Is people like you cause this to happen” (sic). The headline referred to a proposed clampdown by the new government on hospital staff stealing linen, food and laundry supplies from Port-of-Spain General Hospital. Sergeant continued indignantly: “My wife is a matron at the hospital. You know what this is going to cost me?” On August 24, 2002, an article was published in the daily media, under the heading “Businessman held with $15,000 in cocaine”. The article stated that three (named) Task Force officers were on routine patrol when they spotted the businessman “walking hurriedly from a well-known drug den”.

They stopped and searched the businessman, and found the cocaine in his pocket. He was arrested and charged. End of story? In 2004 we were preparing the Hasely Crawford Stadium for an international friendly football match. A sports meeting of area primary schools is just ending as we start the work. Hundreds of children are leaving the stadium via the athletic track and out through the Marathon Tunnel. A few curious little boys wander on to the field which is being prepared.

A security guard tells them to please not walk on the field, and they all begin to walk off obediently.

A woman, a teacher by the authority she believed she had, shouted out “Who say we cyan walk on the grass? All you walk on the field if all you want!”(sic).

The previously obedient little boys stuck out their chests, watched the security “cuteye” and strutted back on the field, kicking at the grass.

Do you understand what I am saying? Do you think that it is only when blood flows that a crime is committed? Do you think that if government officers were fired for stamping defective building plans “approved”, then that level of corruption would end? Or that the store owner would ever accept that he was committing a crime? And what of a police sergeant who supports his matron wife stealing goods from the hospital? From the sick and dying? For him it was an entitlement. And what is a “known drug or cocaine den”, and why are they “known” but never searched? Not even the magistrate asked? Nor the media? And where are those now grown young men who followed their teacher’s call in 2004, defied reason and obedience and strutted defiantly onto the football field? How many of them are alive today? These are the things we have to face if we want to root out crime from our society. Until we accept that crime is festering and growing in all our communities, and cut out the roots from where they are emb e d d e d, we will not stop the blood flowing in our streets.