New low in criminal activity

It is not the first time that bandits have shot children. But, in those cases, the bandits were aiming at adults while the children were nearby.

Still, the very fact that the presence of children gave those bandits no pause meant that they were indifferent to killing even babies once they got their main prey.

The police have not been able to establish a motive for Tuesday’s shooting at Pinto Road, in which 14-year-old Aneisha Simon was killed, and five other teenagers and a six-year-old girl seriously wounded. The only two adults present, Wendell Bowen and Peggy Fortune, were also shot and are in critical condition.

The entire group had been practising at the Simple Sound panyard, and were apparently just wrapping up at around 9 pm when the gunman started shooting at them with a high-powered assault weapon.

There is a similarity between this incident and the two bombs which went off in Port-of-Spain over the past two months. Both types of incident reveal a new lack of discrimination amongst criminals.

Just as the psychopath who planted the bombs didn’t care who was killed or injured, so too the gunman did not care who was shot. It is either that the criminals have become insane or bolder or both.

The second hypothesis — simple boldness — is more tenable, since most mentally ill people in Trinidad and Tobago are not violent and, even when they are, don’t typically use automatic weapons to carry out violent acts.

And the criminals have every reason to feel that they can get away with the most brazen acts of criminality — because the pathetic detection rate of the police gives criminals the assurance they are very likely not to be caught.

The police, as the public discovered from the murder of gang leader Abdul Malick, know the gang members and even the specific rivalries between them. But this intelligence has apparently not helped the police contain gang activities. This may be simple incompetence, although the case of a police firearm which went missing from the St James police station and then turned up in the hands of bandits suggests that there is more than mere incompetence taking place.

However, that particular mystery, which should be relatively easy to solve, is still hanging fire — so the issue of incompetence again rears its head. At the same time, the police cannot be entirely blamed for this situation.

They are, after all, doing their jobs in a context where one Government Minister, Ken Valley, has stated in Parliament that it is necessary to negotiate with "community leaders" in order to contain social problems. Mr Valley has also predicted that crime will drop by the end of the year — but, if the latest trends are anything to go by, his negotiations are apparently not going too well.

The pity is that, when this murderous pattern started, the politicians and police officers did not see that such activities would not be confined to gang warfare but would spill out into the wider community.

Had they taken effective action then, we might not now be at the stage where "collateral damage", to use Prime Minister Patrick Manning’s callous phrase, can be measured by children’s lives.