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  • 1 year ago
Chairman of the Confederation of Regional Business Chambers Vivek Charran says crime has reached untenable heights and those responsible for treating with the problem must do more.

However he does not believe a curfew is the answer.

Nicole M Romany reports.
Transcript
00:00I don't think that the time for a limited curfew is now.
00:05I do believe that a limited curfew, if we look at the last state of emergency that we had,
00:11which was under the UNC, there was, in fact, a state of emergency with a curfew.
00:19That curfew lasted a while, and I think it hurt businesses,
00:22particularly those businesses in the evenings and those that operate at night,
00:27more than anything, and it didn't really get the results.
00:31What it really did is keep the criminals off the streets for a certain period of time.
00:36Charon says what is really required is the dismantling of gangs.
00:41He notes that criminal activity is now spilling over into communities that were not traditionally
00:47hotspot areas, and law-abiding citizens are becoming overwhelmed.
00:52He believes this adds to the perception that the police and government are not doing enough,
00:58and that fear is fuelling the calls for a curfew or state of emergency.
01:03Both the minister and the commissioner of police were hand-selected, they were picked,
01:06they were put into office, and while they were put into office, all this responsibility,
01:13I'm sure it's a very onerous thing to be the head of the TTPS, particularly at this time,
01:20and I'm sure the same must be said about the Ministry of National Security.
01:24Nonetheless, it does not take away from the fact that the responsibility for the safety of the
01:29citizens of Trinidad and Tobago falls squarely upon their shoulders, not upon yours and not upon mine.
01:34Charon notes that many young men are being killed in gang warfare.
01:39He says people will describe them as another bad boy, but they didn't start off that way.
01:46He says the unfortunate truth is that many of them are indoctrinated into this lifestyle.
01:52We continue to see the radicalisation of young men in Trinidad and Tobago,
01:58similar to the radicalisation that was taking place with terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda
02:04and ISIS and so on, where young men were radicalised into fighting a war abroad,
02:09and then when they ended up dead in the battlefield fighting a war that was not their own,
02:14or those that survived that war, they ended up being ostracised from society and unable to
02:20really integrate back into society. And we see a lot of that happening with gangs as well too.
02:26He notes that many young boys also drop out of school and join gangs to earn money. He is
02:32suggesting that perhaps there can be a lowering of the minimum working age to 15 so that the
02:38labour force can absorb these youths. If you're 14 and 15 years old, and you're out of school,
02:45or even if you're in school and you're not going to school that much, and you don't feel like that
02:49is the fit for you, and you're frustrating your parents and so on, or your care providers,
02:54or your relatives, whoever you're staying with, and then suddenly you stop going to school,
03:00they fed up of you, you are disconnected from them, you have no way of earning money,
03:05you have no way of legally earning money because you can't get a job anywhere.
03:08What do you do? Do you stay home and starve? Because everybody says I'm
03:11minding you and we have bills to pay in the house. What are you going to do?
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