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.
03:23We must now fight for our place.
03:26Alexander Brussel, TV6 News.
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