Paolo Kernahan
After sharing the story of my armed robbery online, it became immediately clear that I am not special.
Countless victims came forward on my Facebook post sharing accounts of their ordeals. So I'm just another prey item in a dystopian Caribbean gangster's paradise - one in which safety and personal freedoms have been stripped from citizens by growing numbers of omnipresent hyenas.
I was also reminded this past week of friends who've suffered the ultimate loss at the hands of these criminals. I know two different people who lost parents to seemingly unplanned acts of violence that began as some haphazard attempt at robbery.
It's difficult to imagine ever recovering from that quality of trauma. There's no picking up the pieces. Life doesn't just trundle on. The best you can hope for is, perhaps, fashioning some sort of new, sputtering beginning from the wreckage of smouldering anger and hurt.
The widespread criminality of multiple acts of petty theft, armed robbery, and home invasions every single day on this law-forsaken island isn't normal, even if we behave like it is. This is the culmination of a failure over decades to aggressively treat a growing cancer.
The criminals among us today were made. They didn't spring up organically, merely as the natural output of a modern, consumerist society with once-considerable wealth and attendant socio-economic imbalances. We're reaping the whirlwind of corruption, incompetence, and political manipulation.
Yes, crime is a feature of most contemporary societies. Of course, many choose a path of no good.
However, what law-abiding citizens in TT are suffering goes far beyond the innate evil that lurks in the hearts of men. The ongoing criminal insurrection, while caused by many factors, boils down to one simple truth - we failed to diligently weed the soil before they overwhelmed the crop.
What's interesting is that society has accepted the murder rate as the sole benchmark of criminality. It is, after all, the most heinous of all crimes.
This fixation on homicides by the media, the police, the government, and the public gives a decidedly skewed picture of what's happening here. It has the effect of "minimising" the true extent of criminal activity - even though we're confronted with images and reports of other crimes across conventional and social media every day.
If there are minor variations in the murder rate from one month to the next compared to the previous year, the hierarchy in the police are quick to interpret this as a reduction in crime. Any downward trend, no matter how small, is typically attributed to police interventions.
If, at the end of 2023, we should fall short of last year's record-high murder toll, it's reasonable to predict that CoP Erla Harewood-Christopher will claim this as a win.
However, in other countries criminality is measured as the number of crimes - all crimes - committed against citizens per 100,000 population.
In 2023 there were more than 2,000 robberies and larcenies.
According to
