Our Failure As A Society

Whatever the general state of insecurity that now besets the world, the
state of Trinidad and Tobago stems from the continuing climb in crime and,
more specifically, the rise in the number of murders.

These murders run the full range from domestic to gang killings and while
much has been said and written about the bloody crimes of passion there has
been an ominous silence with respect to the murders that police have been
ritually ascribing to drug-related gang warfare.

In fact the police themselves, seem to think that because these murders are
gang or drug-related they almost do not count the thinking being that they
are isolated affairs and, therefore, pose no danger to the general public.

Such thinking couldn't be more dangerous in that there is no guarantee that
innocent, that is to say, uninvolved citizens will not be caught in the
cross-fire and, in any case, murder is murder unless, of course, the police
want us to believe that these killers and their victims occupy a state
within a state where the laws of the country do not apply.

Moreover the drug-related tag often seems to be a police cop-out whipped
out to appease the public, many of whom may very well share the view that
it would redound to the national good were these young men to kill off each
other.

The trouble with that view, however, is that it allows both the police and
the wider citizenry to escape responsibility since these killings point to
a fundamental societal failure in that, somehow, many young men now have a
value system that is manifestly askew in spite of what we presume to have
been the best efforts of their parents, the schools that they attended and
the religions to which they must have once belonged.

Indeed, without casting aspersions on any of the traditional forms of the
religions that have shared space here for generations we note that the gang
wars around Laventille and Morvant, for example, have a religious slant if
only because some of the men involved are said to ascribe to a militant
aberration of what we always knew here to be a peaceful faith.

Here again we suspect the police have a view that is shared by many
citizens and it is that these young men are far more trouble than they are
worth and that having lived by the sword we should not be overly concerned
by the fact that they are dying or causing others of their ilk to die by
the sword.

But while their leaders have to answer for the blood that is ultimately on
their hands all of us have to look within ourselves and our institutions in
an attempt to discern how we might have contributed to them looking down
woefully wrong avenues for answers to questions that may long have
confronted them.

These have to do with issues of justice particularly as it has a bearing on
employment and other forms of wealth-sharing and while we not only expect
but insist that they be made to feel the full brunt of the law we will be
fooling ourselves if we continue to believe that only punishment is going
to put an end to the bloody rise in crime.