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A New Year traditionally renews feelings of hope. Realism may dash hope so commentators feel pressured not to write gloomily during the Christmas/New Year season.
My first column of last year invited a re-imagining of the possibilities of sustainable co-operation within communities.
I had been departing from the subject of violent crime and had intended at the start of this New Year, 2024, to continue recalling the positive legacies of our art and music, some of which were mentioned in my last two columns published last year.
Before that departure, in a series of columns late last year starting with one entitled Violent crime retrospective, I summarised the essence of my 20 years of commentaries about the prevalence of murder with impunity.
By then editorial writers and others had begun more frankly to recognise the problem of governments permitting the criminals space to operate with impunity.
My position remains this: there has never been any political will to disrupt the busy intersection between party politics, unregulated campaign financing, the underground economy and distrusted elements in law enforcement, while elements of our we like it so society have fed themselves lavishly off of the profligacy of successive governments.
Let me digress briefly to the passing last week of former Prime Minster Basdeo Panday. However favourably or unfavourably he is remembered, recalling his natural wit will bring light hearted smiles.
My valued desk mate from sixth form days described Panday as “a magnetic personality”. He met Panday once only in a restaurant in the company of the restaurant’s proprietor, but was immediately captivated by Panday’s greeting—which my desk mate laughingly recounted as we belatedly exchanged best wishes for the New Year.
Smiles in recollecting Panday’s witticisms will sparkle even in the unavoidable gloom of more murder and butchery, the reality of which cannot be evaded by more Erla Christopher chop logic uttered from her Commissioner of Police office.
(Copyright AFP 2014/ Roberto Schmidt)
Sadly, my departure from the violent crime subject has been interrupted by the latest statement issued by the Prime Minister (the PM), reportedly on his Facebook page, following the killing of Lana Sahadeo in her home by a stray bullet from a Churchill-Roosevelt Highway hit in the middle of the previous Thursday afternoon, in the vicinity of Spring Village.
Perhaps the statements of the top people in government and the police service about violent crime are the product of vapses that say: “the population is worried, scared and grieving, so we better say something, oh gorm, anything.”
In many of my columns I described a type of coup d’état by reference to the work of Professor HLA Hart. This type of coup is one in which the government has ceded control of areas of the state to persons who do not hold constitutional authority but do not need to do so in order to be in charge.
This state of affairs, described by Hart as “a breakdown in ordered legal control”, and in which governments become irrelevant, has unfolded during the respective rules of both PNM and UNC for two decades.
The boundaries of criminal control have been expanding more and more over the two decades of my commentaries to the frightened consternation of the population at large.
The irrelevance of government seeps through the latest statement of the PM. At the end of last October, forced to say something when eight murders were committed between a Sunday and Monday, the PM said that “the State would hunt down and disarm the perpetrators”.
(via TTPS)
Currently, when forced again to say something, the confidence of hunt and disarm is now missing. We are told that “the security services are being constantly resourced to keep them available and effective”.
There will be strategies to disrupt the brazenness of the criminals who firmly believe they have nothing to fear regarding apprehension and, “if apprehended have nothing to fear from the judicial system”.
What about lack of fear of our country’s political management and the criminals’ awareness of the lack of political will to disrupt them and their financiers?
(via TTPS)
The criminals and their covert facilitators are fearlessly carrying on. The government is whimpering.
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Martin G Daly SC is a prominent attorney-at-law. He is a former Independent Senator and past president of the Law Association of Trinidad and Tobago.
He is chairman of the Pat Bishop Foundation and a steelpan music enthusiast.