Crime and policing in Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana

Trinidad and TobagoPolice Commissioner Erla Christopher

Reports reaching Guyana from our sister CARICOM member country, Trinidad and Tobago, suggests that there is something almost surreal about the seemingly ceaseless orgy of violence, underpinned by routine targeted executions, reportedly a manifestation of the proliferation of gruesome ‘gang wars’ in which clinical ‘terminations’ have become the order of the day.

We, in the various other CARICOM countries – some of us with our own fair share of crime notwithstanding – can only recoil in horror as the media in the twin-island Republic ‘serve up’ what, these days, are daily bizarre ‘helpings’ of occurrences involving indiscriminate reported ‘gang wars’ perpetrated by cliques of heavily armed and ruthless gangs of killers who, in many instances, appear to have grafted a generous measure of grizzliness onto their crimes. Here, one of the recent episodes that stand out is the reported ‘visit’ to a hospital in Port of Spain by a gang of gunmen reportedly bent on ‘finishing’ a wounded adversary from a (rival?) gang.