00:00As the state of emergency nears its end, MSJ leader David Abdullah is questioning the Prime Minister's account of its
00:07success, in which he stated that 3,552 people had been charged of the 5,802 people arrested over the
00:16period.
00:17That 5,802 people who had been arrested were not people who were arrested specifically with reference to the objectives
00:28of the SOE.
00:29In other words, these persons were not arrested pursuant to PDOs, and the persons who were charged, all of this
00:39was under normal policing, traffic offenses, other kinds of offenses, including possession of arms and ammunition, and so on, and
00:49so on, larceny and assault, larceny of a motor vehicle, etc.
00:56So, those figures that the Prime Minister used are not the figures that we are to utilize when we are
01:05assessing the success of the state of the emergency.
01:10Abdullah further notes that according to figures provided by the TTPS and the Ministry of Homeland Security, at least 16
01:18people had been charged under the first iteration of the SOE,
01:22with 240 charged thus far under this SOE.
01:27And while the government deserves the right to further extend the SOE, Abdullah believes the move to reintroduce Zoso says
01:35otherwise.
01:36States of public emergency are not crime-fighting initiatives.
01:40They're crime suppression, and similarly, the zones of special operation, as they function in Jamaica,
01:47essentially crime suppression strategies, and were actually introduced because Jamaica had been using rolling states of emergency on the court
01:56in Jamaica,
01:57as in Belize, rule that governments can't use rolling states of emergency to deal with crime,
02:03because states of emergency violate citizens' fundamental rights that are enshrined in the Constitution.
02:12Meantime, one social researcher laments what he terms the colonial policing approach,
02:18which he notes focuses heavily on marginalized urban communities.
02:22Even if we, for argument's sake, decide to apply this militarized containment approach in specific, quote-unquote, zones,
02:32does that include the communities where a lot of the drugs and firearms that end up in places like East
02:43Port of Spain,
02:47Longdonville, John John, Enterprise, Maloney, does that include the fishing villages that are also marginalized,
02:56that have also been historically marginalized for the last 200 years?
03:00Are they going to include those areas where those sleepy, run-down fishing villages where a lot of this stuff
03:08comes in
03:09before distributing to the so-called crime hotspots?
03:15That is something that no one seems to want to address at all.
03:18Regardless, Jokes does not believe that any of these measures would be effective.
03:23There's a short-term lull, a short-term drop,
03:26and then sometimes almost immediately decriminalize the element, move somewhere else, and set up the operations,
03:36and it's usually a cat-and-mouse game.
03:39So at what point are you going to lock down the entire country?
03:45That it makes no sense.
03:47We're not even discussing the reality of the fact that the security forces themselves are also infiltrated
03:54by many of these elements.
03:57There's a whole different kind of worms that need to be opened and examined.
04:04For NASA Cutting, TV6 News.
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