00:00Opposition leader Penelope Beckles reveals to the media that her party received a draft of the Law Reform Zones of Special Operations, Special Security and Community Development Measures Bill 2026 on Wednesday.
00:13The PNM caucused on Thursday, while Beckles and Prime Minister Kamala Poussard-Bissessa were in Tobago for the swearing-in ceremony of the new Tobago People's Party-THA-led administration.
00:24As the state of emergency comes to an end on January 31st, the question of what will transpire pertaining to over 100 SOE detainees is still up in the air.
00:35What do you expect as opposition leader to happen to those cities?
00:38Let me just say to you, dealing how they have dealt with the detainees gives you an example that the government isn't ready.
00:45Because the truth is, it is not a question where you just lock up people and hide them away, and that's all you hear about.
00:52And do you expect lawsuits?
00:54Similar to the last occasion when they lost to almost every case? Yes, I do.
01:00Chairman of the PNM and MP4 Aruka Lopino Marvin Gonzalez says the legislation signals that a government is not willing to engage in the work and policies which will see people inclined to commit crime turning their lives around.
01:14That the only mechanism by which they intend to fight crime is under emergency powers.
01:20The United National Congress had accused the PNM of not implementing adequate steps to reduce crime.
01:26The UNC is a bunch of hypocrites and you can't take them too seriously, you know.
01:29It is the same people who fired over 50,000 people.
01:34Gonzalez notes that the majority of them fall at the lower level of the economic scale in the country.
01:39He further states that all of the programs implemented under the PNM to assist in crime mitigation in oppressed communities have been canceled by the UNC administration.
01:49That's inclusive of CPEP and URP.
01:52Gonzalez believes emergency powers, while producing short-term gains, cannot sustain them in the long term.
01:59Despite the programs that you just referred to, the crime rate continued to escalate.
02:04How then do you respond to that kind of an argument?
02:08Well, murders increased and rather the PNM, right before we left office, we saw a corresponding, we had called a state of emergency and we had seen a reduction in murder.
02:21So before the UNC came into government, there was a reduction in murder somewhere in the region of 35 percent because of the state of emergency.
02:28Gonzalez is dismissing any notion that the programs were ineffective, saying that while homicides remained a challenge, there was a decrease in many other categories of serious crime.
02:39MP for Laventil West, Kareem Marcel, represents a constituency in which stigmas pertaining to crime are attached.
02:46He stresses the importance of applying updated statistics to any designation of zones of special operations to avoid communities from being targeted based on stereotyping.
02:57Because you have found yourself in a position where the whole of Trinidad and Tobago is caught up in this whole war numbers, war, whether it's six, seven, eight, across the whole of Trinidad and Tobago.
03:09So is it that we are going, how are we going to be deeming what is a hotspot?
03:13And two, how are we going to ensure that it is an attempt in terms of equity across the board?
03:21Marcel and Port of Spain North St. Anne's West MP Stuart Young are concerned about the infringement of rights and freedoms under the Constitution.
03:30We in the opposition have serious issues with it.
03:33It seems to me that all this is is an attempt to get around the Constitution and the state of emergency legislation that has safeguards in place.
03:41What I'm very concerned about is it being used in a prejudicial manner.
03:45The designation of areas as zones of special operations carries with it ramifications such as searches without warrants and 72-hour curfews.
03:55And all of the power now resides in one person.
03:58A prime minister being able to say your neighborhood as opposed to her neighborhood is a neighborhood that the police and the defense force can literally lock down.
04:07Young calls it draconian and a quote-unquote admission of failure, saying there are enough laws on the books to treat with crime.
04:14Alicia Boucher, TV6 News.
