The Government of Trinidad and Tobago is facing a concerted private sector protest over what the business community says is its acute vulnerability to the present bloody urban crime wave which, apart from its manifestation in cold-blooded murders and confrontations among heavily armed gangs, has also been having a severely debilitating effect on a private sector now seized with an acute attack of jitteriness. Expressions of concern over the targeting of business owners in encounters that have led to both loss of life and robberies have been mixed with frontal attacks on the ability of the state to stem the tide of the prevailing crime spree, with criticism of the state’s response targeting the country’s Prime Minister, Dr. Keith Rowley, directly, as well as Trinidad and Tobago’s first ever female Commissioner of Police, Erla Harewood-Christopher.
Reports in sections of the Trinidad and Tobago media suggest that the broader private sector now believes that the country’s economic future is under serious threat from seemingly ruthless gangs of gun-toting criminals and that the political administration has no clear plan to roll back the threat at this Juncture. While the media in Port-of-Spain appears to make no direct link between the gangland-style killings that characterize what appears to be a surge of urban gang wars, the business community is being kept on its toes by robberies which, not infrequently, lead to the killing, wounding or ‘roughing up’ of business owners and their attendants.
In the wake of the crime spree, the media in Trinidad and Tobago have been providing a grisly fatality count, one of those, provided days ago asserting that the country had recorded nineteen murders in four days. A Rio Clara businesswoman and three men standing outside a Pizza Bar were on the list of persons reportedly shot and killed over last weekend.
A measure of the extent of the alarm emanating from the country’s private sector in the wake of the killing spree is reflected in a pronouncement days ago by Trinidad and Tobago Chamber of Industry and Commerce President Kiran Maraj asserting that the current crime-fighting measures have failed to yield the success that members of the Chamber had been hoping for. Maraj has reportedly thrown out a recommendation to effect collaboration involving civil society organizations and business sector organizations to discuss ideas for rolling back what is now a full-fledged crime spree.
Police Erla Harewood.
Maraj has been quoted as saying that her own organization is not seeing “the kind of round table discussions to really deal with this situation.” Maraj is also quoted as saying that the T&T Chamber is “very skeptical as to what has been put in place to try and curb the spate of crime.”
Not a great deal appears to have been going the way of the administration of Prime Minister Keith Rowley in the area of public approval rating in the wake of the crime wave. Days ago the Newsday newspaper gave Dr. Keith Rowley’s Tuesday July 16 meeting with heads of the state security apparatus to brainstorm the crime challenge short shrift.
In response to his articulation of his administration’s “serious concern” about “the continued use of illegal high-powered assault weapons” and his reported call for “a more proactive, intelligence-driven” approach to tackling the crime spree, the Newsday brushed aside his remarks as “old hat” and a “copy and paste” offering. Seemingly bent on sustaining the sense of fear and apprehension that has now obtained for several weeks, armed gangs reportedly launched more bloody attacks over the weekend. Reportedly, a woman who had only just celebrated her first wedding anniversary and a young couple in bed with their four-year-old son, were murdered over the weekend, the victims numbering among eight people killed in less than 24 hours.
