This article was first published in the Trinidad Express Newspapers on January 1st 2018.
When my granddaughter who is a typical Trini, of many mixed ethnicities, announced that she was leaving Trinidad and moving to New York, I was apprehensive. Trump’s USA is no place for people of colour, I thought, but she was adamant. She had been working for the Judiciary in Port of Spain and used to walk to get lunch along the same trajectory that Shannon Banfield walked, before she was murdered after work and stuffed into a barrel in the top floor of the IAM building . A crime, like so many others that has never been solved, or, rather, that no one has ever been charged or convicted for..
She is an attractive, independent, professional woman and complained that she never felt safe walking in Port of Spain. Even driving around the Savannah on the way home, men in cars going the same way would roll down their windows and yell obscene suggestions at her. Nowhere is safe here for attractive young women, they have become the most endangered species in the country, prey for crass and uncouth men who think it is their right to use obscenities when encountering women. This is not joking and it is not funny. Although to do so is also against the law (Summary Offences Act Ch11:02 Section 49, ) I know of no actual instance where such gross behavior has been prosecuted.
But I still thought that she would be safer in T&T than in New York.
I was wrong.
According to statistics recently published by the NYPD , New York, with a population of 8.5 million had fewer murders in the past year than T&T, with a population of (at last estimate) 1.3 million. Do the math.
Trinidad& Tobago’s population with 7,200,000 fewer people than in one American City has totaled just under 500 murders this past year, whereas New York has had 284, if you include the terrorist attack on the Brooklyn Bridge that killed eight and injured I don’t know how many more. If you exclude that number it would come to 277. In a ratio of 1.3::8.5 New York has six and a half times the population of T&T with just under half the number of murders in one year. If their police service were as efficient at dealing with murder as ours is, there should have been over three thousand murders, give or take corpse or two…or three.
Aren’t Statistics fun! On December 31 each year statisticians act as though the slate is wiped clean and we all start again from zero crime although the day before there were five murders.. That is crime logic. Makes us look good. That is the kind of Alt-Reality we have been using for years.
From last year to this year robberies in New York were down 10.2%, In 2013, the last year we could get local statistics for, ours were down by 6.8 over the previous year. There, felony assaults were down 7.1%. Ours were up 6.6. There , Auto theft went down 11% , ours went up by 57 and grand larceny, whatever that is, in New York was down 3%. (Is that what we call “white collar crime”? fraud and corruption, charging for goods and services not performed or delivered? Adding personal ‘commission’ on to government contracts? Police accepting bribes for looking the other way? That sort of thing ??) Their’s went down, ours , at least those that were reported, went up. By an average of 367.3 every year.
Mind you, it wasn’t always like that. In 1990, there were well over 2000 murders in New York. In 1990 there were only 84 in the whole of T&T. But every year for the past twenty-seven years, the murder rate in New York has gone steadily down, and almost every year in T&T it has gone up. Is there something we could learn from those foreigners?
And I was afraid for my grand-daughter’s safety in New York!?
It is not all a success story there, however, The Mayor, the Governor of the state and the Commissioner of Police in New York city (Thy actually have one) are deeply concerned and deeply ashamed that while everything else went down, sex crimes and domestic violence went up. By one percent. How appalling! Here, only incest and sexual offences are measured. Domestic Violence, which , incidentally , is among the offences in the “Offences Against the Person Act” is not even counted in the police statistics until it becomes murder..
In New York, they are trying to do something about reducing Domestic Violence. They are using the methodologies that have resulted in twenty-seven years of consistent reductions in crime generally.
Not rocket science, apparently. Just recruitment practices and performance monitoring that reduces the chances of any cop being corrupt or in the pay of criminals. It includes going after small groups…gangs and repeat offenders. They are expanding, not contracting their Community Policing Programs. They are investing in something called “crisis intervention training” which is meant to prevent crimes from happening. This is a revolutionary new and different philosophy from the suspect, smash, enter, beat up, arrest, charge and convict philosophy that we are more familiar with and which we have supported and insisted on for the past sixty years. We insist on it because of course, in our culture, it works. Doesn’t it? Well, doesn’t it?
