Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

Min­is­ter of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Roger Alexan­der is urg­ing the pub­lic to do their part in se­cur­ing their com­mu­ni­ties by part­ner­ing with law en­force­ment, not­ing that safe neigh­bour­hoods can­not be achieved if cit­i­zens with­hold po­ten­tial­ly life-sav­ing in­for­ma­tion.

Re­spond­ing to Guardian Me­dia ques­tions on the crime woes af­fect­ing the coun­try dur­ing an East­er Egg Hunt and East­er Bon­net com­pe­ti­tion at his con­stituen­cy of­fice on El Do­ra­do Road, Tun­pau­na, yes­ter­day, Alexan­der ac­knowl­edged that mur­ders were con­tin­u­ing even as a State of Emer­gency (SoE) re­mains in ef­fect.

Among these mur­ders were 11-month-old Jay­den Sut­ton and his fa­ther Joseph Sut­ton, 25, who were killed while in bed at their Dun­don­ald Hill, St James home ear­ly on March 31.

Re­flect­ing on the cir­cum­stances of the at­tack and the sud­den, un­pre­dictable na­ture of such shoot­ings, Alexan­der lament­ed that re­al­is­ti­cal­ly, the po­lice could not be ex­pect­ed to have knowl­edge of every in­stance of vi­o­lence be­fore­hand.

He, how­ev­er, not­ed that there may be peo­ple who would have in­for­ma­tion on the sit­u­a­tion and pressed home that their co-op­er­a­tion was crit­i­cal to pre­vent­ing fur­ther vi­o­lence.

“How do you pre­vent a sit­u­a­tion where a man is be­hav­ing in a cer­tain way, com­mit­ting crimes and go­ing home to his child? How do you pre­vent his mur­der, as a po­lice of­fi­cer, un­less in­for­ma­tion comes di­rect­ly to you to avoid it?” he said.

“There are peo­ple who are com­mit­ting crimes time and time again and are go­ing home to their fam­i­lies.”

Alexan­der al­so said it was un­for­tu­nate that some seg­ments of so­ci­ety were crit­i­cal of the Gov­ern­ment’s re­sponse to crime, as he felt that they were over­ly dis­parag­ing of any strat­e­gy.

He, there­fore, urged cit­i­zens to be more proac­tive in crime pre­ven­tion by co-op­er­at­ing with the po­lice be­fore crimes hap­pen.

“The so­ci­ety can be con­fus­ing as far as I can see... if you take harsh mea­sures, they have an is­sue with it. If you take any mea­sure at all, they have an is­sue with it. Peo­ple have to stop wait­ing to be­come vic­tims to see the need to as­sist.”

When Guardian Me­dia vis­it­ed Dun­don­ald Hill, St James, last week in the af­ter­math of the mur­ders of fa­ther and son, res­i­dents called for an end to vi­o­lence in the com­mu­ni­ty but al­so main­tained that they were mis­trust­ful of po­lice.

One man, who asked not to be named, said there were con­cerns that shar­ing in­for­ma­tion with the po­lice could place them in di­rect dan­ger, if the same of­fi­cers leaked the iden­ti­ties of in­for­mants to crim­i­nals in the neigh­bour­hood.

Re­spond­ing to these con­cerns, Alexan­der said while such con­cerns were un­der­stand­able, this was not the case in po­lice-in­volved shoot­ings, where some res­i­dents open­ly call for jus­tice and ac­count­abil­i­ty.

“There’s no cry for jus­tice when broth­ers kill broth­ers. There’s a com­plete si­lence in the same neigh­bour­hood.”

Alexan­der said he was al­so part­ner­ing with oth­er agen­cies to in­tro­duce par­ent­ing work­shops as part of a pre­ven­ta­tive an­ti-crime strat­e­gy, where par­ents in need of guid­ance and sup­port would re­ceive train­ing on how to ef­fec­tive­ly man­age their chil­dren in healthy en­vi­ron­ments.

Re­fer­ring to in­stances where chil­dren be­gin show­ing trou­ble­some and an­ti-so­cial be­hav­iour which grad­u­al­ly wors­ens over time, Alexan­der said ear­ly-stage in­ter­ven­tion was nec­es­sary, but ad­mit­ted this could be dif­fi­cult where par­ents them­selves did not have the ex­pe­ri­ence or tools to so­cialise their chil­dren. He pro­posed the cre­ation of pro­grammes to strength­en com­mu­ni­ties against crim­i­nal­i­ty by start­ing with fam­i­lies.

“Some of them just be­came par­ents just like that with­out any guid­ance of their own, so now we’re try­ing to pre­vent that sit­u­a­tion from per­pet­u­at­ing. How do you tell some­one that drugs are bad when the par­ents them­selves are in­volved and it’s min­gling among the peo­ple in the home?”

Alexan­der said the work­shops will be done on a con­sis­tent ba­sis to en­sure the par­tic­i­pa­tion of par­ents.