A year-end report on criminal gangs in Trinidad and Tobago offers little hope that violent crime there, or elsewhere in the Caribbean, will be significantly reduced during the next decade. Issued by the Small Arms Survey of Switzerland, a research project at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, ‘No Other Life: Gangs, Guns and Governance in Trinidad and Tobago’ records that the twin-island nation now has more gun-related deaths than Jamaica and a murder rate (42 per 100,000) more than double the regional average (18.1 per 100,00). Police estimate that the majority of these killings are carried out by the “roughly 80 gangs with a membership of no more than 1,200 people [which] ‘work’ [the country].” Perhaps the most sobering sentence in the welter of statistical information is that “[o]n a per capita basis, the eastern districts of Port of Spain are among the most dangerous places on the planet and, as a whole, the murder rate for Port of Spain is comparable to that of Baghdad.”

Although the ruling PNM keeps making the right noises about tackling gang violence, the report notes skeptically that the police force’s crime-fighting measures are “mitigated by the government’s direct financial support to urban gangs via public welfare programmes.” In return for this largesse, “come election days, these gangs have been frequently called upon to turn out loyal supporters and physically menace would-be opposition voters. These tactics are credited with helping the present regime cling to power in the context of an electorate narrowly divided by race.” As if this were not discouraging enough, there are also credible reports of widespread police corruption and fears that the hoodlums who enforce gang orders at street level are overseen by a “class of professional criminals… composed of members of the Jamaat al Muslimeen or other criminal networks who often supply gang vendors with resources.”

Gang violence has consumed Trinidad with terrifying speed. Between 1998 and 2008 the number of murders has increased fivefold, from 98 to 550, and the number of guns seized by the police has risen from 140 to 437. Depressingly, these increases have taken place during a prosperous decade. Some of this is probably due to the fact that the social inequalities which provoke a great deal of crime become more difficult to bear during economic booms. For most of the last decade, however, it is generally true that residents of the capital’s better neighbourhoods have lived at a relatively safe distance from the country’s worst violence. As the report observes, gun violence in the island “overwhelmingly” afflicts “the country’s poor, urban, African rather than its Indian or Caucasian residents.” But as the gangs become emboldened almost everyone has come to fear the consequences of their growing influence. There are now belated efforts to strengthen penalties for the possession of illegal firearms (parliament is also debating anti-gang legislation which could allow wiretapping and the detention of suspects for up to 60 days), but since the police only solve about a fifth of the island’s violent crimes, much of what is now being considered is likely to prove too little too late.

In Trinidad, as elsewhere, government promises of zero tolerance are usually little more than political theatre. The problems of criminal violence, drug-related or otherwise, can hardly ever be solved through harsher legislation. Obviously, law enforcement has to play a central role in restraining the spread of organized crime, but in the absence of wider efforts to tackle the poverty, unemployment and social marginalisation which give rise to so much gang activity, its gains are limited and temporary. Policemen can only restrict criminality, and they can do little or nothing to eliminate its root causes. In one of its most telling passages, the report points out that “Interviews with police and social workers tend to reinforce the possibility that, in families, generations can fully embrace the gang lifestyle. Delinquent acts are said to frequently begin at a young age, even as early as primary school. Gang affiliation then may be not only a rite of passage into adulthood, but an ongoing way of life.” These are problems for which there are no quick fixes.

In the last ten years, Guyana has lived through drug-related violence which is comparable to Trinidad’s. As the criminals have grown more brazen and brutal, most of us, understandably, have yearned for more aggressive police tactics and tougher criminal penalties. These may help to make us feel safer, but they will not change the dynamic which produces the criminal subculture in which gangs thrive. In fact there is growing evidence that this parallel world can only be altered by much wider efforts to address the social pathologies which drive many young people to join gangs in the first place.

In recent years community-based programmes like the Chicago Cease-Fire Project have shown that it is possible to impede the growth of gang culture. By engaging in dialogue with ‘high-risk’ youths between the ages of 7 and 24 before they become enmeshed in the gangs’ social networks the Chicago project has been particularly successful in this regard. Without initiatives like that, straightforward law enforcement is a Sisyphean task, for every criminal killed or captured is quickly replaced by others who want a larger piece of the action. Guns, drugs, and gang violence are all symptomatic of our wider failings as a society (educational, moral, political and economic) and unless we are prepared to alter the culture which sustains them, we should accept that they will all pose significant risks to our collective security for the foreseeable future.