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As Parliament debates extending the State of Emergency for another three months, could Trinidad and Tobago learn from Jamaica's controversial Zone of Special Operations programme?
Did ZOSOs help reduce crime? Could they work here? And what legal lessons emerge from Jamaica's own battles over emergency powers?
We're joined by security expert Professor Anthony Clayton for an in-depth discussion on crime fighting, constitutional rights and the future of public security in Trinidad and Tobago.
Did ZOSOs help reduce crime? Could they work here? And what legal lessons emerge from Jamaica's own battles over emergency powers?
We're joined by security expert Professor Anthony Clayton for an in-depth discussion on crime fighting, constitutional rights and the future of public security in Trinidad and Tobago.
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NewsTranscript
00:14a very good evening and welcome to beyond the headlines tonight as parliament debates a three
00:20month extension of the state of emergency we reflect on a proposal in the national conversation
00:27whether trinidad and tobago should adopt elements of jamaica's zone of special operations or zozo model
00:35supporters point to jamaica's reported crime reductions in designated communities while
00:41critics argue that any expansion of extraordinary security powers must be carefully balanced
00:46against constitutional rights and legal safeguards jamaica itself has faced court challenges over
00:53the repeated use and extensions of states of emergency with court's ruling against aspects
01:00of the practice joining us tonight is professor anthony clayton one of the leading voices on
01:07security policy in the caribbean to examine whether the lessons from jamaica can be applied here
01:13and what hurdles trinidad and tobago can face professor clayton thank you so much for joining
01:19us if i'm not mistaken you would have um assisted in um coming up with the uh national security
01:27policy for jamaica as well yes that's right i was the lead author of the current national
01:35security policy which was promulgated in 2014 and that would have included these also legislation
01:43uh what it set out was a strategy called clear hold and build which is a strategy for normalizing
01:51high crime troubled communities and that was the basis of the zozo approach which was introduced in
01:592017 three years later now but those are different from soes um soes is a state of emergency
02:10emergency which is already provided for under the constitution and essentially an soe suspends
02:17normal process when it comes to for example putting people on trial now we have actually done both
02:25in parallel in jamaica we've had soes and zozos the soes were very controversial the zozos have not
02:35be controversial because those do not involve a suspension of the normal process of putting people
02:42on trial and as a result they were accepted by both of our two main political parties and they've been
02:50generally welcomed in the communities where they were applied so there's this very important
02:55distinction here between zozos and esoes that is very interesting because we have had here while it
03:02had just been a discussion and legislation was not passed in in our parliament the perception is that
03:11zozos in fact suspend more rights than states of emergency uh no they don't no um essentially what they do
03:21is i mean we tried to put in a an actual formal structure for this um which hasn't been strictly
03:27followed
03:28um but the idea was that whenever the homicide rate in a community went over double the national average
03:37that that would trigger a zozo and that would allow for example the army to be deployed not to do
03:45normal
03:45policing but to secure the perimeter and then within the perimeter the police could operate normally and
03:52this would allow the police to go into an area and provide normal policing in a way that was previously
03:58impossible however we didn't get everything right with the zozo either um the the main point of a zozo
04:06and it's very important to understand this an soe in a zozo are not ends in themselves they should not
04:13be
04:13seen uh merely as a crime suppression strategy although of course when you do have a heavy police
04:22presence in an area the crime rate does go down but that's not a permanent solution because eventually
04:29you have to draw down back to normal level of policing and then the crime rate typically goes back up
04:35what what you do is you buy yourself a period of time and in that period of time you have
04:43to go in
04:43and you have to fix the street lights fix the roads fix the schools fix the clinics and do a
04:50lot of
04:51social interventions so that you try to get the community and you don't have an infinite amount of
04:58time to do that but essentially you try and get the community on your side in many of these communities
05:04the relationship with the police is is is seriously damaged you have to rebuild that and you have to
05:11get a lot of people in the community who really see the benefits of a peaceful way of life and
05:19you get
05:20the majority of the community um committed to this better vision for how the community can live and then
05:29you can it's safer then to draw down your level of policing because the community are then typically
05:35the first to tell you if they see gang members starting to re-infiltrate into the community this was
05:43partly based on what the model that was developed in rio de janeiro with um a program which unfortunately
05:55has now been terminated but was very very successful when it was operated the pacifying police strategy
06:01and this was applied in the city of rio de janeiro where they had several thousand favelas which is
06:08high crime troubled communities and this was a program to normalize these communities
06:15the police would go in initially paramilitary police but they wouldn't stay they were only there to get the
06:21gang members out and the guns out then they would hand over and this would typically
06:26typically be less than three months to the specially trained uh pacifying police and these were police
06:33who were trained in social intervention and they did some wonderful social intervention programs
06:40and of course many wonderful things happened because amongst other things the people living in
06:46these communities saw their property prices go up four or five fold in a couple of years because all of
06:53a
06:53sudden these communities became investable and businesses started setting up so once you've got
06:59to that stage the community is then committed to this program that you've put in for them professor before
07:06we get into these also let's just talk a little bit about the states of emergency i know during our
07:13uh
07:13pre-interview you did say you didn't want to delve into the courts reasoning but i think it's important
07:18for our viewers to understand that jamaica's courts ruled that repeated states of emergency were
07:25unconstitutional and one of the arguments in trinidad and tobago is that the current security situation
07:31requires extraordinary measures a short while ago the attorney general told the parliament uh he actually
07:38alluded to alleged threats uh to his life and to that of the prime minister now jamaica's courts
07:46back to jamaica their courts appeared concerned that emergency powers were being used to address a
07:51chronic crime problem as you said earlier rather than a temporary emergency is that a distinction in
07:59your opinion that our lawmakers should be paying attention to as they debate another three-month extension
08:06uh yes what happened in jamaica was that in 2020 the courts ruled that that you couldn't simply use
08:17a stated emergency in response to a crime problem especially when you're having to apply them over and
08:24over and over again that was not what they were intended for um really an soe is only to be
08:31used
08:32in a situation where you've got widespread social breakdown and then it is absolutely justified but
08:38using it in crime suppression strategies when that you weren't really addressing the fundamental problems
08:44in those communities the court said was it was not it was not on was not okay and the court
08:50was also
08:50concerned that there were some people who had been had been interned for many months and had still not
08:58been put on trial and the court said no that was not okay either that it may be necessary to
09:06take some
09:06of the violence producers out of the community and we have to be have to understand that in in some
09:14cases
09:14you cannot get anybody to testify against these people because they have a history of having witnesses
09:20murdered so you have to get them out of the community you have to be able to hold them while
09:27you do all of the other community stabilization measures but they still have to be put on trial
09:32because once we lose that then we're in a very difficult position legally morally and constitutionally
09:40it's very important that we do not lose the moral high ground in the fight against crime now i appreciate
09:46you alluding to the moral high ground because given jamaica's experience in your opinion what
09:53safeguards should we in tnt introduce to ensure that public security is strengthened um on one hand but we
10:00don't undermine civil liberties well the the problem that we have with violence is very unevenly distributed
10:10it is highly concentrated into a few communities and it is absolutely legitimate that we to think of
10:19having special policing measures for those communities and that does mean um going into these communities with a
10:27in significant strength and being able to um have high levels of of patrol um and crime prevention um
10:36um in and in crime suppression strategies but that's not that's not an actual solution that is only giving
10:45you the time to actually deal with the problems now if i could give you an example as to why
10:50that is so important
10:53we we we can take down we can attack we can take down the gangs and we've done a lot
11:00of that over the last year in
11:02particular in jamaica and there's been some significant progress in terms of degrading dismantling and
11:08degrading the gangs but then the gaps you create this part of this power vacuum and a whole new generation
11:18of young gang members uh starts to come up and you have um in fact the level of violence may
11:25go up
11:26because when you take off the gang leadership you now have people fighting to take over the territory
11:31take over the gang take over the activity so what you also have to do is look at the process
11:36of
11:36recruitment and you look at the drive that and you have to dismantle those factors as well
11:43now one of the big problems that we have and this is something that is way outside the remit of
11:49the
11:49police is that we have a lot of children in these communities who are neglected abused and exposed to
11:57the acts of extreme violence you have children who've witnessed three acts of extreme violence
12:04including murder for the time they're three or four now children who have um gone through that
12:12tend to have um permanent um hyperactivity attention deficit disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder
12:23now what that means is that they their performance at school disintegrates they can't concentrate they
12:29can't focus we have children who are going to school from these communities and they're never sure
12:37if they're going to make it to school because they're walking down streets where shots are being fired
12:42now the school can to some extent provide a temporary safe haven but even that was breaking down
12:48because we were having killings um knife fights and so forth in the school the children who are severely
12:57stressed in that way their brains are flooded with cortisol which is a hormone linked to stress
13:06in a young developing brain it changes the volume and structure of the brain
13:11those children come out with their permanent permanent impairment of intelligence and permanent
13:20impairment of their ability to concentrate and studies in other countries have found that children
13:25who have been traumatized that way are approximately 10 times more likely to end up in jail in later life
13:33so you have to break the cycle you have intervening in family you have to have peacekeeping measures and you
13:41have to have the patience to realize that this is going to take a generation to fix um because this
13:48this
13:48problem didn't come from nowhere this problem took decades to build to the level it has and it cannot be
13:56fixed overnight it cannot be fixed with a three-month soe all what the soe all the zoso does and
14:04i really
14:04would recommend the zoso over the soe um because it doesn't have the same issues with legality
14:12uh due process and so on but what all it does is it buys you time to start to fix
14:17the real underlying
14:18causes of the problem and your success depends on whether or not you can make substantial progress
14:25with those problems now let me ask you professor um i think we would be very close to uh 12
14:35months
14:35out of the past 15 in states of emergency is there a danger that these repeated or prolonged emergency
14:46measures become normalized well yes um because they shouldn't be used routinely a state of emergency
14:57is really best kept for actual emergencies if you have for example um a natural disaster
15:05uh communications are done there's looting there's rioting on the streets and soe is entirely
15:11appropriate but as a crime fighting measure no because you're not really addressing the problem
15:18you need two things you need violent suppression but that's just a holding operation and that's just
15:24until you can so that you can get in and start fixing the problems on the ground if i could
15:30go back
15:31for a moment to the example that we used which is the one developed in rio de janeuro
15:38the the paramilitary police and the army would be in a community for three months and then they'd be
15:43out but in that three months they would actually build new police stations a concentration of new
15:51police stations in that community and then the pacifying police who are quite often younger just
15:58outside police academy specially trained and less likely to be um confrontational less likely to be
16:07confrontational less likely to be corrupt less likely to be linked with the gangs those officers
16:14were picked to go into these communities and start building decent human relationships
16:20with the communities and they did amazing things they actually had for example after school facilities
16:27in police stations because one of the big problems was you've got a lot of um
16:32single parent households and the parents working and the child is coming back nobody's looking after
16:38the child no nobody's making sure the child is doing his homework so the police said well we'll do
16:44that and they set up a room in police stations filled it with books toys and the pre and the
16:51children
16:51could go there and have a completely safe place to sit and do their homework and just think you know
16:58measures like that had completely changed the way people thought about the police if i'm not mistaken
17:04professor this same um after school type uh atmosphere or environment was used in new york and it
17:11significantly took down crime well we didn't do very much of it i mean i wish we had this is
17:19the bit
17:20that we got wrong too i think the problem that we had and i think this is a a widespread
17:27problem
17:28politicians want quick solutions and they want an answer before the next election and when you go
17:33along and say look it's going to take us and and this is what they did in real they when
17:39the police went
17:39in the pacifying police they said we're here for the next 25 years and that's our promise to you
17:46you know and so but if you go to a politician you say well this is a 25 year program
17:53really what we
17:54need to do is we need to see a whole new generation preferably two generations of children coming up
18:00who've not been brutalized they've not been traumatized who've been who have grown to regard
18:05the police as their friends then it will then this community will be fully reintegrated it will be
18:14normalized it will be a peaceful community and then we can and we will run this as a rolling program
18:22we will always be moving on into the next community and the next community and so on
18:26until we've turned this whole situation around but this is long term and the politicians always
18:32tempted to say well you know but i need results the elections in seven months i need results by then
18:38and so there's always this tendency to go for short term fixes pressure
18:47professor um time is upon us so i'm going to speed through some of the questions now for those of
18:53our viewers who may be unfamiliar with the concept of what exactly is a zone of special operation now
19:00we've heard about it legislation as i mentioned was not uh passed in in our parliament but what is it
19:08exactly in jamaica if you could explain that to us and how does it differ from the state of emergency
19:15a
19:15little more detail well the the difference is really in um the zoso is already in the constitution it's
19:23already allowed uh the zoso had to be introduced and really there was no particular legislation involved
19:30it was really just about changing policing tactics and strategies it means a very significant police
19:36presence with military support so that uh you can and then again this is important the military are
19:43not taking over policing but police they don't have policing powers they're not trying to um we're not
19:49using the military instead of the police the idea is that the military make it possible for the police to
19:54do normal policing there are some communities that never saw a police officer
20:00who wasn't in their paramilitary uniform and now we have police officers in these communities in
20:07their regular uniform which is a very much less threatening and this is uh this in itself is quite
20:14a powerful confidence building measure it's saying to these communities yet you too are have the right to
20:24expect the police to be here to protect you not uh you're not vermin you're not irredeemably violent
20:32there are bad people here we know that you know that better than we do and the police are here
20:38to
20:38protect you and that's an incredibly powerful and important message to get across and so the zoso really
20:45means um you're going in in sufficient numbers to make a difference we made the mistake in jamaica of
20:55using it as a short-term measure so it has to keep coming back to parliament through the authorization
21:00to run these special policing operations to be renewed i i feel that was a serious error we should
21:07have gone for the open-ended option as they did brazil from the outset because if the community know
21:14that you're going away in three months there's no incentive to give up the gang members
21:20because you will go and they're still got to live there and the gang members are still there
21:25and then it might be a death sentence for them so you really need to build the confidence in the
21:31community that you're there to stay what specific problems were was jamaica trying to solve when it
21:38introduced those schools well we had an appalling homicide rate we our peak year was 2009 when our
21:48homicide rate went up to 63 000 we've had and several years recently we've had the highest homicide
21:56rate national homicide rate in the world now we started to see that inching down from 2020 onwards
22:05through to 2025 and not all going in one direction but the general trend was gradually lower and then
22:122005 for the first time we got a really dramatic reduction it went down by nearly half which was
22:20astonishing now we're still in the world's top 10 you know we but we've moved from the top of the
22:27world's top 10 to the bottom of the world's top 10 and that is real progress a huge so i'm
22:34taking from
22:35what you said that there is real evidence that those work my next question which has been a huge debate
22:42here
22:42is that gang members simply migrate from one zone to another they do and you have to be ready for
22:51that
22:51now what you do is you think that through in advance and you think through where the gang members are
22:58going to go uh they don't have infinite options usually they try and go over into a community where
23:06there's some alignment between the gangs because if they go into an opposing gangs territory it's going to be a
23:12a lot of problems for them um so they try they don't have an infinite range of options where they
23:18can
23:18go and what you do is you prepare for that you plan for that and you look at um sealing
23:25off the exit routes
23:26and screening people as they go in and out a lot of these communities they've only got two or three
23:31entrance points and it's not difficult to close those off and screen people
23:37now professor trinidad and tobago faces a different criminal landscape including gang violence firearm
23:45trafficking and kidnappings can this also model in your opinion be adapted to our circumstances
23:53it probably can yes um because some you've got it is true that crime is evolving and we've got new
24:02gang structures emerging uh we've got for the first time in the last few years we've seen virtual
24:08gangs emerging um it used to be that gangs typically came from one community they all knew each other
24:15that's not always the case now and we've got some transnational criminal operations going on between
24:21people who've never met they don't even know each other's real names this is a purely virtual operation
24:27we're seeing criminal activities being outsourced something like something like kidnapping though
24:32this is unlikely uh to be the case so for particular forms of crime uh where you still have to
24:40actually
24:40know who's involved know the geography know people's travel to work pattern or go to school pattern
24:47in those cases as though so it could probably be very effective i do want to emphasize though it's not
24:54a magic wand it doesn't solve everything like i said it really just buys you time and a bit of
25:00stability in which and that's the time that you've got to actually address this real underlying problems
25:07dismantle the gangs dismantle the criminal structures put in normal social services and government services
25:14and turn the community around into a law-abiding community professor cleta my closing question looking
25:21ahead if you had to advise policy makers here in tnt on one long-term strategy to reduce violent crime
25:29beyond emergency powers what would it be there is no one strategy um you strategy is always going to be
25:39a number of different tools so you have something like a zosa uh you need to cut that you need
25:45to clamp
25:45down on the weapons being imported into the country you need to get um develop some more specific skill sets
25:53within the police force um the single most important is intelligence-led policing
25:58and with all of that as part of your overall approach to crime you can go a far way
26:04professor anthony clayton let me thank you so much for joining us sharing your time
26:08and your expertise if only you could share that cup of tea the debate over the state of emergency is
26:16ultimately about balancing public safety with constitutional rights as parliament considers
26:22whether emergency power should continue the experience of jamaica offers both lessons and warnings
26:28about what extraordinary security measures can achieve and where the law may draw the line i'm
26:35urvashi to worry ruknarai and thank you for joining us on beyond the headlines it's back to disha after the
26:41break
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