Red line passed long ago

By comparison, neighbouring Barbados has a rate of 9 per 100,000. Jamaica, with the third highest murder rate in the world (after Colombia and South Africa) stands at 45 per 100,000 persons. This country’s murder rate is higher than the United States’, that superpower seeing 16 murders for every 100,000 persons. But the US is a glaring exception among developed nations. Countries like Norway and Sweden have murder rates of 2.2 and 1.7 respectively; Japan’s murder rate is 0.7; and the United Kingdom’s is 0.6.

The trends in our society are not encouraging. In 1995, Trinidad and Tobago had 122 murders, with 41 solved; in 2004, there were 259 murders, with 66 solved. In other words, the solve rate dropped from an already dismal 33 percent to an even more dismal 25 percent. Naturally, crime has now overwhelmed all other issues. Prime Minister Patrick Manning presents a Budget with a whopping $34 billion of goodies, and the first reaction is that he spent only ten minutes on crime and said nothing new. In the midst of positive economic indicators, there are continual reports of business persons packing up and leaving for safer climes.

Mr Manning has lent the blithe assurance that the crime situation is "temporary". In saying this, he might have been banking on crime typically having a cycle with peaks and valleys; or he may have been banking on the bandits killing one another in sufficient numbers so that the murder rate would consequently go down. But one thing that Mr Manning was almost certainly not banking on was the effectiveness of the Government’s crime-fighting strategies After all, given the importance all sectors of the society now place on battling crime, and given the kudos that would attach to a government that contained the murderous upsurge, Mr Manning would long ago have assumed the National Security portfolio if he really believed that crime would soon fall. The fact that Mr Manning has chosen not to do so in our Maximum Leader culture suggests that he does not want to become the target of criticism, and that Senator Martin Joseph’s main role is to deflect such criticisms from his political leader.

This strategy has only been partly successful. Citizens have laid blame for this situation at the feet of the Manning administration, not only because it is usual in our culture to blame the government for various ills, but also because of the manner in which the PNM regime has approached the entire issue. First there was the tendency to downplay the situation, then, when the figures became too high to allow denial, to offer all kinds of excuses for government’s ineffectuality - ranging from the Opposition refusing to support the Police Reform Bills to crime being international to the Police Commissioner not appearing on TV often enough. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens become more and more hopeless.

This newspaper has suggested that the Government needs to take drastic action to fundamentally reform the law enforcement system, instead of tinkering and instead of setting up a parallel unit which has not itself made any significant inroads. Will the 300-plus murder figure spur the politicians and other persons in authority to take revolutionary measures? We shall wait and see.