Fixing Crime in a Lawless Land... (Six of One, Half a Dozen of the Other)

A guy was explaining to his friend something unbelievable that happened while he was at church - “Brother I was sitting there, minding my own business, when this man sitting behind me pulled out a brown paper bag, rolled the biggest joint I have ever seen and lit it, right there in the church. Man, I was so surprised I almost spilled my rum and coke all over the crossword puzzle I was doing.”

Now clearly that (hopefully still) is a joke, but I use it here to demonstrate a simple point, something intrinsically Trinidadian that one has to take into account when looking for solutions to crime and the enforcement of law in this country, and that is most Trinidadians do not want the enforcement of all laws, just the ones that they themselves are not breaking. As a brief aside, could you imagine the impact on society if the list of Summary Offenses was taught in our schools? Wouldn't children come home and  say “Hey dad” or “Hey mom, you know that thing you do is against the law? Look, right here in my school book it say so.”

But back on point (and yes, I know, that IS a good idea) how do we ever get consensus on the best way forward when we cannot even agree on what is really wrong or deserving of punishment? The corporate bigshots who have no problem engaging in money laundering, profiteering or even open racketeering  are no different from the gangster stick up artist who thinks his crimes are not as bad as the big shot crimes, so how do we fix this? How do you fix a country when the only wrongs the people want fixing are the ones that they themselves are not committing? How do we continue to pretend that the one size fits all approach could ever work when we refuse to at least understand what is wrong here from the top down?

For their part and in response, the government is spending an inordinate amount of time trying to convince the nation that giving the army powers of arrest is some magic bullet in the fight against crime, but how so, when the real drivers of crime in this country, the 99% of the real anti-society activities are things that soldier police could never impact on? Things like supermarket consortiums ganging up to set prices so as to frustrate competitiveness and gouge consumers, can soldier police deal with that? Or the food importers that are using gangster techniques to create fake monopolies so as to achieve the same ends, how would soldier police impact on that? Our banking industry has to be the most abusive and villainous of all our legal corporate identities, and the grief that they are allowed to cause the society is almost already outside of the remit of our trained police, so how would soldier police be able to treat with this?

Would we unleash soldier police on the political party financiers doing contract rigging for kick backs? How about the government and state officials engaging in corruption that frustrates due process for graft, would we mount them up and send them in? How would soldier police have managed the billions that were looted out of the CLICO empire? Someone said that if we were to add up every single crime of theft that has taken place in this country ever since Christopher Columbus first walked on these shores from 1492 to today they STILL would not add up to the estimated twenty one billion that CLICO cost the people of this country, and yet Monteil and Duprey are still walking about free, would soldier police be used to arrest them?

It seems to me that more important than precepting one, two or then thousand soldiers to arrest the end result we should be focusing on dealing with the real drivers of our violent crime. It would much more sense in my view to precept one thousand accountants to hunt down the paper trails of the white collar criminals, kick down Boardroom doors and arrest those wayward Directors. Seriously. Give accounting firms like Ernst & Young, DeLoitte & Touche and others real policing powers including powers of arrest, that is, if we REALLY want to impact on crime at the level at which it is caused. It should not be given it to Price Waterhouse Coopers though, because after what they are alleged to have done while on watch at CLICO, they would just probably end up driving the getaway car...