00:00Criminologist Dr. Randy C. Passard said the research was exploratory and conducted with researchers Dr. Dinesh Ramsoak and Dr. Linda
00:09Muhammad of the University of Trinidad and Tobago.
00:12He said the study used two separate sets of data to analyze murders in the country.
00:17What this particular study does is that it uses two totally different data sets to try to determine what are
00:28some of the spatial and temporal predictors of murder in Trinidad and Tobago.
00:34C. Passard said murder levels in this country have increased over time.
00:37He noted that between 1990 and 2000, murder figures remained relatively stable, but after the year 2000, there was a
00:47general increase, culminating with 626 murders in 2024.
00:53And while criminal gangs are often blamed for the increase, C. Passard said they are not the only factor.
00:59A lot of research indicates that criminal gangs are responsible for that rise. It's not the only factor, but it's
01:06one of the big ones responsible for the rise after 2000.
01:10One of the data sets used in the research came from the Crime and Problem Analysis Unit of the Trinidad
01:16and Tobago Police Service.
01:17The second data set came from the National Crime Victimization Survey, which collected responses from more than 3,000 adults.
01:25C. Passard said the survey gathered information from communities across the country about social conditions within those areas.
01:34Researchers then merged the two data sets by mapping the crime data and the survey responses using geographic coordinates.
01:42The crime data included thousands of records for murders committed between 2015 and 2023.
01:48When we analyzed the murder data, we found out that murders are spatially stable and temporally stable in Trinidad and
01:59Tobago.
02:00He explained that the analysis showed that murders were not randomly distributed across the country.
02:06Instead, killings tended to occur repeatedly in the same communities.
02:11C. Passard said the findings suggested that certain environmental or structural conditions within communities could be contributing to higher levels
02:22of violence.
02:23To examine this further, researchers used survey responses to measure community-level factors.
02:30One question, for example, involved questions about parenting practices and how often parents punished children by restricting activities they enjoyed.
02:41These individual responses were converted into scores and then averaged within small geographic areas known as enumeration districts.
02:51Researchers then compared those community-level measures with murder rates in the same areas.
02:57He said the analysis examined several possible predictors, including poverty, parenting practices, school quality, social cohesion, and police effectiveness.
03:08He said the findings could help guide further research into crime patterns across the country.
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