During a news conference on Monday morning, called to explain the proclamation of a State of Emergency (SoE) in T&T, acting Attorney General Stuart Young linked the shooting death on Saturday afternoon of Trevor Williams, who has been described as the bodyguard of a priority offender, to the execution-style killing of five men at Prizgar Lands, Laventille, on Sunday night.
Williams was shot right outside the Besson St Police Station in east Port-of-Spain. He had accompanied a man Mr Young described as being “well known to the law enforcement agencies of Trinidad and Tobago,” who escaped the attempt on his life.
“All intelligence and the information provided to us by the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service is that this was a reprisal shooting and that there can be expected heightened reprisal activities by the criminal elements, in and around certain places in Trinidad and Tobago, that took us out of what we can consider the norm,” Young said.
Mr Young presented a cogent and compelling argument on Monday that an SoE was warranted because following the two deadly incidents, criminal gangs were likely “to immediately increase their brazen acts of violence in reprisal shootings on a scale so extensive that it threatens persons and will endanger public safety.”
On Tuesday night, on the cusp of the New Year, young attorney Randall Hector was walking to his car after attending a Seven Day Adventist church service in Port-of-Spain, when he was gunned down in what can be accurately described as “a brazen act of violence.”
It has been reported that Mr Hector, who had established his own chambers, had accepted a brief from the Director of Public Prosecutions to serve as a special prosecutor in the State’s case against a gang leader.
The question that arises is whether the killing of the attorney was an aspect of the “heightened reprisal activities by the criminal elements,” to which Mr Young referred at Monday’s news conference, or if there is another explanation. Whatever the reason, the fact and manner of Mr Hector’s killing are likely to have a chilling effect on the State’s prosecution of known gang leaders who are apprehended during the SoE or after. In that regard, the parallel with the shooting death of Dana Seetahal in May 2014 is stark.
When the brazenness of Mr Hector’s killing, on the day after the SoE was declared, is added to Saturday’s murder just outside a police station in the capital city, the issue that T&T’s law enforcement infrastructure must consider is whether the gangsters are likely to be bridled by the current security lockdown.
While three days of the SoE may not provide enough time for a proper assessment of the impact of the measure, that is something the authorities have to keep constantly under review and on which they must be prepared to demonstrate some flexibility.
On balance, many businesspeople and business groups give the Government the benefit of the doubt for not including a curfew in the SoE. But if the SoE was declared to prevent open warfare and/or reprisal killings between rival gangs, and these continue, the administration’s curfew policy would need to be revised.
Finally, if the Government believes that the technological and surveillance capabilities of the police and army are not fit for purpose, the country’s leaders must not be ashamed to request external assistance.
