Gangs of T&TOriginally printed at
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/news/Gangs_of_T_T-112138139.htmlBy Kevin Baldeosingh
December 18, 2010
Gangs have existed in Trinidad since the 19th century, but gang murders officially only started in 2001.
The template for today's gangs might have been created in the post-Emancipation period. UWI sociologist Maureen Warner-Lewis has suggested that various Carnival bands from East Dry River and La Cour Harp in the 19th century may have been organised according to the ethnic groupings of immigrants from Africa. Stickfighting bands in the 1880s used to partition their territory which other bands could not cross at any time. "For purposes of martial display," wrote UWI academic Basil Matthews in a 1952 paper, "the St Augustine bridge formed the bloody boundary between Tunapuna and St Joseph."
Cultural scholar Gordon Rohlehr, in his book Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad, notes that 1946 to 1956 saw an increase in cases of wounding and robbery with violence and murder. He writes: "Some of this violence took place between gangs or groups of youths in the city and its environs, and was related to the emergence of the steelbands as social organisations to the legendary stick-fighting bands of the 19th century."
These groups were even more defiant, if not so murderous, as today's criminal gangs. The 1948 Annual Report of the Commissioner of Police records that "Hooliganism broke out in Port of Spain and a section of the North-West Division's areas when steelbands, in defiance of the law, came out and played in the streets; they attacked small squads of the police who tried to disperse them."
The first study of criminal gangs was done by UWI sociologist Clivin C Victor in the 1960s, as part of an analysis of juvenile delinquency in Trinidad and Tobago. Victor was able to study three gangs from Port of Spain, and his conclusions about how gangs function seem to hold today.
"As one member told me, 'We gangsmen must obey we rules, if even we have to break everybody else own, is only so we could look out for weself... Participation in gangland codes of behaviour brought out a different type of evaluation about life than that shared by the wider society... The individual trying to join or get into a gang must show by his actions that he is disenchanted with the larger society. By one's walk, one's dress, one's speech, and general attitude, there is a singleness of purpose—to foster the values of the group."
Victor also gathered statistics which showed that "the period just prior to Independence was marked by a decline in both juvenile and adult offences, but both have risen since the early 1960s, although the rise in serious crime far outstretches the rise in delinquency."
Forty years after Victor's study, another researcher would link gang violence specifically to the policies of the People's National Movement government, which came into office in 1956.
The next set of empirical information on gangs came from a 1995 survey of Laventille done by UWI's Institute of Social and Economic Research. Sociologist Roy McCree, who asked Laventille residents about gangs, found that 83 per cent of them claimed to have no knowledge of such groups.
Since gangs had existed for decades in this community, and would emerge just six years later as a key instrument of murders, the Laventillians' response seems to indicate more about their attitude to providing information about criminals than the actual prevalence of gangs. Of the 14 per cent who admitted that they were aware of such groups, 59 per cent named three or fewer, while 17 per cent knew about four or more gangs. Nearly one-third of these gangs, they said, were involved in robberies, and just ten per cent in drug trafficking.
Political scientist Selwyn Ryan, who headed the study, linked gangs and politicians, writing: "Elements in Laventille, however, know how to play the political game, and always tend to put pressure on governments to increase allocations for work projects, particularly in the months prior to elections... Party and gang rivalry over job allocation, which sometimes resulted in inter-village feuds, gun battles, and fatalities, also occur quite frequently."
As Table 1 shows, however, it wasn't until 2001 that the authorities began classifying some murders as gang-related.
Gangs are at the centre of today's high murder rate. In 2002, gang killings accounted for 30 per cent of murders, and, by 2008, the gang killings comprised nearly two-thirds of all murders. In 2009, this dropped to just one-third, but that may have been due to statistical sleight-of-hand since the number of homicides classified as "revenge" leapt from an average of 20 to 77.
In 2005, then-National Security Minister Martin Joseph told the Parliament there were 66 known gangs in T&T with 500 "hardcore" members.
Three years later, Joseph revealed the number had expanded, with 86 gangs totalling 1,720 members.
Two weeks ago, in piloting the Government's proposed Anti-Gang Bill, Attorney General Anand Ramlogan said there were now 110 gangs operating in T&T, each with an average membership of 12 people. That gives a total of over 1,300 members—less than previously claimed by Joseph, although the number of gangs have supposedly increased.
At any rate, between 2002 and 2009, there were 1,012 gang murders out of a total of 3,090 homicides.
What has caused this change in gang culture in T&T? It may not, as popularly and officially supposed, be drug-trafficking. The Vision 2020 sub-committee's report on national security, submitted in 2003, noted that "Contrary to popular pronouncements, murders associated with the drug trade on average constituted only 8.2 per cent of the reported murders".
An alternative explanation for the rise in murders is State funding for the URP. The Vision 2020 Poverty Report noted that "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".
Swedish researcher Dorn Townsend, in a 2009 paper titled No Other Life: Guns, Gangs, and Governance in Trinidad and Tobago, argued: "The main sources of income for gangs is the selling of marijuana and cocaine to neighbours who are users. Usually, this income is supplemented by cashing in on government contracts from the federal URP. Gangs typically thrive as hands-on completers of URP's small-scale public works programmes."
Townsend estimates gang members earn between $30 to $200 a day "depending on the size of territory controlled, their rank in the gang, and the payoff from the crimes they have committed." However, the gang leaders make a lot more. "At the time of their deaths, some leaders, such as Mark Guerra, had accumulated expensive real estate, sports cars, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in their accounts," he wrote.
Table 2 shows the annual allocation for the Unemployment Relief Programme, the percentage of gang murders, and total homicides. There is no clear correlation between allocation and gang killings. There is a drop in 2004, then a giant jump in 2007.
The year 2002 is significant, however: this was when then-Prime Minister Patrick Manning had a secret meeting with gang leaders. When the media revealed the details, Manning dubbed the gang leaders as "community leaders".
"The government's stated aim... was to settle local gang wars and so reduce the incidence of butchery," Townsend wrote. As Table 2 shows, there was indeed a relative drop in gang-related murders over the next two years. But that changed in 2005.
"The sessions also cemented a relationship whereby (now deceased) top gang bosses like Mark Guerra and Kerwin 'Fresh' Phillip were able to lead parallel public lives," wrote Townsend. "These private sessions have prompted suspicions of government complicity with the gangs' criminal agendas."
