Undoing crime: heavy manners

August 25, 2004

Crime fighting is largely the province of the Police Service. Okay, we know that crime is a social problem and that there has to be a holistic approach to minimising the effects of social deviance.

We know that there are many variables that could lead to people falling through the cracks despite all the well-intentioned programmes of all the agencies that society over time have utilised to nurture, mould and engage citizens from cradle to grave; family, school and church being the three major ones of such agencies.

We know that in these modern times the family, as an agency, has been put under great stress as communities come apart, as the man-woman relationship stands in need of total reconstituting on the basis of a whole new set of assumptions starting with gender balance in every regard and as the struggles for survival prove to be rather more disruptive than constructive.

At the same time, school as well as church can no longer command the moral authority that they once did, given the fact that the passage of time, the revelations and exposures, the demystification of once acceptable convention and the popular democratic demands from below have all together served to render the social structures of school and church obsolete, and now they both stand in utter need of review, retooling and refashioning to suit the times.

Nothing fundamentally different has replaced the colonial order and arrangement of things, there has been no new departure, no new system of values, to set us apart as distinct and unique ground and space. So in the meantime, anything goes and there is this callous disregard for anything stamped as authority.

In such an objective context, you put a runaway drug trade with regional and international structural components, eg offshore banks, and everything must turn "ole mas," as the popular saying goes.

Look, there are people, young people, who under certain influences can really "fall through the cracks." But there are enough programmes funded by the proceeds of the social safety net available to them for redemption.

Our society is crumbling, but that is not to say that there are not numerous means available to all and sundry. And there are many people who day after day seek help and actually climb out of the darkest and grimiest holes to eventually reform themselves.

Then there are the people who make the conscious decision to accept a life of crime. They are the professional criminals. They are the smallest of minorities but they possess sway and in some instances are the only "authority" respected on the blocks and the so-called "hot-spots," particularly along the urban corridor.

Whereas the society as a whole, employing its varied institutions, has to fight crime in a holistic way, the Police Service has to deal with the professional criminals expeditiously and ruthlessly as "heavy manners" is all they understand.

Burroughs? Remember him? He in his day took the fight to that element. He was always down in the trenches. And even as a Commissioner of Police he was not desk-oriented as all his successors have proven to be.

Burroughs understood clearly that he could not ever afford to lose "control of the streets" to the criminal element.

Most of all, the then Prime Minister, Dr Eric Williams, gave Burroughs a free hand to marshall his frontal attack on both the criminal element and on those youths whose activities were anti-establishment and significantly political in nature. Burroughs in his treatment never made any distinction between the one and the other. But that in itself is another story.

But can you imagine Burroughs then or even Tony May calling on all police officers on leave to report back to duty for whatever reason and either of them getting the negative response that the present COP, Trevor Paul, got this week? That was not possible then, but it has happened now.

It is another example of the callous disregard for any form of authority that plagues the society today from top to bottom.

And though one may understand the position of trade unions that all changes in terms and conditions of employment have to be negotiated, the overriding consideration is that the police comprise an essential service and we are in a crisis in which the criminal elements have taken control of the streets and the Commissioner of Police has to reestablish law and order at all levels.

In Mr Burroughs’ day the question of limited or unlimited states of emergency never arose. He virtually instituted curfews in certain areas unknown to the rest of society.

I can recall that in certain areas like Fyzabad, parts of Diego Martin, Mt Hope/Mt Lambert/Petit Bourg, Tunapuna, Febeau Village, etc youth were literally banned from "liming" for periods of time. No youth, particularly the male, could come out onto the streets at night. Burroughs simply locked-down the place until the police dismantled the crime network therein and resumed full control of the area.

Then, as surreptitiously as they came, Burroughs and his Flying Squad left. Even the police themselves were mortally afraid of the Flying Squad.

Past members of that Flying Squad will tell you today that when the chief called on them to move, they never knew where they were gong until they reached, so no member of the squad could contact anyone or inform on their movement. And in those days there were no cell phones as you have today.

The other interesting point of note about Burroughs is that he maintained a network of informers and always had the funds to sustain this.

He would be informed of any untoward happening mere minutes after it occurred and the Flying Squad would be on the backs of the key offenders before they could think of devising their escape.

To facilitate all this Burroughs operated an informal but quite functional office at the Red Spot Nightclub at Curepe Junction where gamblers, prostitutes, bad-johns, etc, from all over the country, freely associated.

Listen and listen well, there is nothing to a Giuliani anti-crime plan other than somebody assuming full authority and being given a free hand to manage as he sees fit the resources to do the work.

Why are we always unable to recollect how we dealt with matters in the past? We do not need to look elsewhere. The answers are always right before our eyes. Then, why this persistent collective amnesia? Why?