Crime and the untouchables
By Clarence Rambharat (T&T Express)
The country's crime strategy looks like it is chasing stray bullets. That strategy is to find out what has not been tried and pelt millions behind it. To keep a cool head about it, expect nothing and you shall not be disappointed. These appearances can be deceiving. Yesterday's blimp is today's COMPSTAT. Tomorrow who knows what we will come up with: a robot as Commissioner of Police or have we tried that? Cockeyed politicians have missed the country's hottest crime spot: the untouchables and their hefty accounts and investments. Who dares to find the fountain of wealth?
Spending on national security has been a billion-dollar hole in the floor; an expedition involving hardware and software but no credible strategy. A billion-dollar cocaine trade remains untouched and bank accounts remain piled high with drug money, shrouded by the politeness of a small tight society.
In a culture of look-away, we believe some people have a divine right to anonymity. Cartel-funded profits and hush money course through all-inclusive fetes; real estate; mas and soca bands and exclusive shops in expensive malls. And through the automotive trade, jewelry shops, sport bars and developments stacked on the hills. Genuine commercial activity and drug facades are intricately woven, all befitting their space at the various chambers of business and commerce. On the streets people are not reluctant to make little comments, but no one goes beyond the small talk we grew up with. You can't fight gangsters with rum talk so none of us has seen a major local drug prosecution in our lifetime.
In this land everybody knows everybody and surely everybody must know who letting the cocaine pass.
Many no longer venture down into the city, too much risk I suppose. There are no palm trees and bougainvillaea lining these roads, just little boys with card phones and small guns, a warning system on two legs. But there are no cops to warn about; they don't come except when it is time to collect. The warnings are about rival gangsters, mammie popos prematurely making gun-toting and enforcement a profession. Beyond the hills, this scene is replicated across the islands, a drug and guns protocol thatched into every village.
But the true professionals are on higher ground, first-tier dealmakers. First-tier at the national level but in a much grander narco org-chart they are piddling.
Some are in multi-storied city buildings carrying on business as usual. For many buy, mark-up and sell offers more of a sheath than a livelihood. Some are in the professions and wherever else they can justify regular cash flow. All have a common interest in things that fly and things that float; all have their eyes on the water around the islands and the darkness falling upon the coastline, a night blanket safely in place for several hours.
Even nature cooperates with them but their biggest help comes from politicians who put and keep in place the required level of incompetence, greed and malleability. A billion-dollar drug trade cannot survive without cockeyed politicians and national security employees twisted like galvanise nails.
Drugs, guns and untouchability have been threaded into the fabric. This is not India's untouchables and ostracised. This is something on the other end of the spectrum, an ingrained code of hush-hush or silence wrapped up with awe, specially reserved for a group of yet unknowns on the first-tier. Because of their self-promotion, respectability and brutal efficiency, the country pays a daily homage of corpses, each riddled by the new national instrument. Bullet-ridden bodies cause little alarm; tears do not go beyond the salutary wailing of child-mothers and mammies, until now a little too sexy to care. Somebody "thiefing" the soul of the nation the calypsonian turned politician sang, but who to blame? Those at the first tier, whose real trade have yoked the politicians.
I wonder about these corpses and that numbness over the killings and the numbers. Statistically we are surely doing better than next year, but how much is too much? It could be that the more they kill the more we can tolerate, and 1,000 will be upon us. Over a decade, inflation has hit the body count. And if the drug trade, the corpses and the guns are worrisome, the numbness is far more dangerous. Seven murders between last Thursday and early Friday morning: most will go unsolved and if anybody dares to tag a culprit the justice system will configure an exit route. The map will be part planned, part inadvertent. No witnesses; dead witnesses; witnesses with temporary memory loss; botched police work; dumb jurors; unqualified forensic experts and the best lawyers money can buy. Everything and everyone can be bought, sold or traded. Failing that anybody could get killed.
Perhaps each of us will live long enough to realise that no police car, fast patrol vehicle, helicopter, COMPSTAT system, highway patrol station, blimp, battleship and gunship will stop the killings. And no Commissioner of Police, Minister of National Security and National Security Council will stop the killings. Too much has been built on secrecy and denial and a society that has grown up believing that everything is somehow going to be alright. It will not until we make it so by going after the country's hottest crime spot: the first and second tiers and the untouchables.
