Kevin Baldeosingh
Does crime go up when the People’s National Movement (PNM) is in office?
In the days right after the September 7 general election, homicide rates spiked in both Trinidad and Tobago. Within the subsequent fortnight, more than 20 people were murdered, causing the 2015 homicide total to surpass last year’s for the first time.
San Juan Bartaria MP Fuad Khan became the new opposition’s spokesman to make political hay out of the spike, even while he denied that he was playing politics.
“It is clear that the PNM has no immediate plans to deter the rampant murder and crime spree occurring in our nation at this time,” Khan said in a media release. “Instead of dealing with the matter head-on, the Minister is attempting to defer questions on this matter by claiming that I am attempting to politicise crime. Nothing can be further from the truth...until such time that this Government implements any immediate measures to ensure the safety of our citizens, my only course of action is to highlight the wanton disregard that Major General Edmund Dillon has displayed since being appointed to office.”
New National Security Minister Dillon told the media, “As we continue to deal with the strategic ideas, we have to understand the reality on the ground is what confronts us...In fact, as we speak there are operational aspects in play now. From since early this morning dealing with the crime situation so there are simultaneous approaches. We cannot deal with strategic things without an understanding of the reality on the ground.”
The question of why operational policing should be suspended or even revamped when a new political party takes office remains unanswered. But the last PNM government’s record on crime-fighting was abject—under the Patrick Manning administration from 2001 to 2010, homicides went up by 300 per cent with then-national security minister Martin Joseph (now deceased) promising every year that the measures the government had put in place would soon bear fruit. This never happened.
When the PNM was appointed by then-president Arthur NR Robinson to office due to the 18-18 deadlock, the murder total for 2000 was 120 people. In their first year, that rose to 171, and then climbed steadily to a high of 547 in 2008, one year after the party was re-elected. See TABLE 1
The 2000 general election was held on December 11, so homicides had already risen under the UNC regime. That trend continued for the PNM’s first year in office thereafter. However, these rises may not reflect any PNM governance effect per se, but may instead be criminal elements perceiving transitions in governments as an opportunity to increase their illegal activities. This possibility can be crudely tested by looking at homicide rates in the years when the PNM was voted out of office: 1986, 1995, and 2010. See TABLE 2
The 1986 general election was held in December, and the NAR presided over a 29 per cent rise in the murder rate in the following year. But when the UNC and the People’s Partnership took office in 1995 and 2010 respectively, the murder rate went down.
None of this is conclusive, since the data are too thin. Nor may this month’s jump in murders mean anything. Such spikes are common in many years. Figures from the T&T Police Service show that, in 2005, there was an average of 32 murders every month.
But that figure was higher in May, August and November for a year-end total of 386. In 2007, spikes occurred in August, October, November and December, for a total of 391. In 2008, the jumps happened in May and July.
There is no obvious pattern to these spikes, nor do they occur during any particular event, such as Carnival or Christmas, when people assume criminal activity increases. In 2015, there were 36 murders in June, 44 in July, and 41 in August. So even with the post-election spike, September will not be especially anomalous.
But culture critic and author Raymond Ramcharitar has long argued that the PNM’s governance exacerbates crime in T&T. “The PNM’s open and symbiotic association with crime didn’t start in 2007,” he wrote on January 22, 2014, in the Trinidad Guardian.
“It started half-century before...the PNM’s relationship with criminality is/was not just consorting with, and having a membership which included, working criminals. The PNM literally brought crime with it into power. From 1996–2001, crime fell dramatically. From 2002 to 2010, it rose to the levels that terrify us today. This mirrors another era. From 1950–1955 (the Gomes government) crime declined. From 1956-1966 reported crimes went from about 35,000 to more than 53,000.”
However, statistics cannot really be compared between eras, especially crime statistics. This is because definitions of offences sometimes change or are re-classified into different categories. Moreover, modern statistics are influenced by factors such as insurance penetration (people are more likely to report a crime if they have to collect insurance payments) and new types of crime, so the figures don’t necessarily reveal additional or lower numbers of crime victims.
Additionally, police statistics themselves are unreliable due to under-reporting from citizens, what police officers choose to record, and what crimes police prioritise in their investigations. But even if these statistics were per-fectly accurate, a correlation with PNM administrations does not prove causation.
Historically, crime rates also rose throughout Western Europe and North America from the 1960s to the 1990s. Their per capita rates were never as high as ours—Trinidad has been ranked in the top ten most murderous nations since the 1970s—but the trend was the same. Moreover, criminologists in all these countries could not figure out what was causing the uptick, since all indicators should in theory have led to a reduction in crime: incomes were rising, unemployment had declined, more poor children were getting an education, and poverty levels were going down. But the pattern noted by Ramcharitar was also present in the Mother Country from which T&T had become independent just a few years before.
“Murder rates having generally fallen in Britain from 1900 to 1960, then more than doubled to a peak in the mid-1990s,” writes journalist Nick Ross in his book Crime: How to Solve It. “Almost every other measure of offending went up too. What was going on? Well, for a start there were peaks in the supply of people most likely to commit offences and be victims of them, notably young males. There were two post-war baby booms, with another small spike in the 1960s, which no doubt had a major influence. There were also economic troughs which made people idle and frustrated and may have encouraged some of them to, shall we say, cut corners.”
Ross makes the counter-intuitive argument that it is not poverty per se which causes crime, but wealth. Economists (but not criminologists) have also noted that crime goes up when there is a sudden increase in GDP—ie, the kind of revenue stream that is typical of resource-based economies, like T&T’s. This would explain why murders and other crimes rose so drastically from 2003, when gas and oil prices rose to unprecedented levels. Which is not to say that government policy is irrelevant.
Gang-related murders first appeared on police statistics in 2002, when they accounted for three per cent of all homicides. By 2002, this had risen to 12 per cent, but by 2006 it was 20 per cent, and by 2008 75 per cent. In those years, state funding for the URP rose nearly four-fold from $100 million to $381 million, although the number of people employed increased by just one-third from 20,000 persons to 30,000 per fortnight. The Vision 2020 Poverty Report noted, “Laventille residents claim that these programmes are distributed to groups that are either politically affiliated or groups that are perceived to be highly aggressive and able to impose their will by the threat of violence” and even then-minister Joseph admitted that "it is very possible" that the programme was linked to the rising murder rate.
Whatever the factors, the Keith Rowley administration now has to prove itself different from past PNM regimes in respect of crime reduction.
The PNM manifesto promises on crime
The new PNM Government will move swiftly to
rebuild our Coast Guard, restore confidence in
the armed forces and protective services, and
reconstruct our anti-gang, forensic, and criminal
surveillance systems.
The PNM will tackle Youth Criminality head-on
through the implementation of preventative
actions that take into account the broad range of
underlying personal (low attainment, problematic
behaviour, bullying), parenting (inconsistent
parenting, poor mental health, domestic
violence) and family (socioeconomic stress, poor
neighbourhood conditions) risk factors involved
in youth offending and antisocial behaviour in an
attempt to tackle emerging problems before they
become serious and entrenched.
TABLE 1: Murder totals when PNM elected
Year Party Homicides
1991 PNM N/A
2000 UNC 120
2001 UNC 151
2002 PNM 171
Sources: Meighoo 2003, T&T Police Service
TABLE 2: Years when PNM voted out
Year Party Homicides
1985 PNM 99
1986 PNM 79
1987 NAR 102
1988 NAR 85
1990 NAR 84
1995 PNM 122
1996 UNC 107
2009 PNM 506
2010 PP 473
Sources: Meighoo 2003, TTPS