Despite an overall reduction in major crimes, Police Commissioner Allister Guevarro says Trinidad and Tobago remains trapped in fear and that many citizens are still making reckless choices that place them in danger.
He made the remarks while speaking at AmCham's 29th Annual HSSE and Cybersecurity Conference. Alexander Bruzual has more in this report.
00:00At the conference, Commissioner Guevara stated that the country's crime landscape is now being shaped by technology, adaptability, and public behavior.
00:10We are our own worst enemies, and we have become a gullible society.
00:17And we have enabled ourselves to become victims of crime in the process.
00:22You can't tell me that an individual will be on Facebook, and this is something that happens every single day in Trinidad.
00:32You go in to buy a car, you put $40,000 in your pocket, and you go to meet a man down in the bottom of St. Paul Street.
00:40You're inviting yourself to be robbed.
00:42The commissioner said such incidents are common and point to what he described as a national numbness to criminal activity.
00:52We're numbed to certain aspects of crime, and that numbness takes place on a societal level where we have begun even going into the schools to try and catch them while they're young.
01:06Guevara said that the fear of crime now outweighs the reality.
01:11Crime is done, but do you know what is pervasive in society right now?
01:16The fear of crime.
01:17We have been under this threat of homicides and serious crimes for far so long that Trinidad has become ingrained in this fear.
01:28Everything is crime, crime, crime, crime, crime.
01:30But nobody is seeing that crime is actually at its lowest in how many years at this point in time.
01:35He also pointed to social media as a major risk factor, singling out two platforms commonly used by criminals to target victims.
01:43Every single comstand, I hear my commanders telling me about persons who have become victims and re-victimized with the same two apps.
01:57And those apps are Facebook and Grindr.
02:00I have no idea why Trinidad loves Grindr and Facebook so much.
02:04Commissioner Guevara said the changing face of crime means that both public and private security professionals must keep pace with technology.
02:26He noted that his recent participation in the IACP 2025 conference in Colorado was focused on technology and its use in law enforcement and security.
02:39You have robots taking reports at the desk from persons now.
02:44You have robotic dogs doing dynamic entry for EOD, explosive ordinance disposal.
02:51You have vehicles that you would park, send up cameras and do monitoring, automatic drone dispatch when you make a 999 call.
03:01So the drone gets to your house like a minute or two and they are able to monitor and feed that information back to the command center.
03:10He said these advances are redefining global security.
03:14So technology has taken over a majority of the human impact on security.
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