Nelson Street residents speak out
By Mark PouchetWhile some Nelson Street, Port of Spain residents and businesses believe the State of Emergency is helping to curb the criminal activity in the area, many believe police know who the criminals are and are possibly involved with them.
Resident Selwyn Peters, an employee of the Housing Development Corporation who also moonlights as a helper at Frederick Jones Hardware and Church Goods on lower Nelson Street, told the Sunday Express the shop's owners had become prisoners in their store, compared to 40 years ago.
"We used to sell goods on the pavement now everything is caged in, burglar proof on the roof, the front, the back, the side...everywhere," he said, adding that he believed the police and some of the 21 Nelson Street residents, arrested and then released recently, knew one another well.
The shop's cashier, who did not want to disclose her name, recalled an incident in which a man from the area robbed them at gunpoint on consecutive days.
She said on the first day the man was dressed in just a bandanna and wore tattered clothes while on the second day he was decked out in "brand name clothes".
"He said, 'I come for the same thing I came yesterday'," she said, adding that he asked them to empty the cash register again, "and he said 'you think I should take the dollar bills and the 25 cent pieces?'"
Barber Elton Lopez, who has been plying his trade for decades near the corner of Queen and Nelson streets, used to reside upstairs the New Steam Laundry on Nelson Street over ten years ago before he moved to Laventille.
Saying he didn't mix with people in the area, he said he could count the number of clients he had from Nelson Street on his two hands.
Lopez said his only experience with crime was when he was cutting a client's hair and an assailant approached the man in the barber's chair and yanked his gold chain from around his neck.
"But that is the only thing I ever experience around here and it ended up that fella was not even from Nelson Street," he said.
Fifty-three-year-old Gary Francis, who lives in the housing development opposite Faure Street and who has been living on Nelson Street since he was three years old, said what the Government was doing was working.
"To an extent what they doing is a nice thing," he said. " Because now people are walking outdoors and feel a bit more free about their surroundings although people still stay away from up there (upper Nelson Street)."
He said the only problem he and his friends (a group of seven of his contemporaries sitting down and drinking on Faure Street corner) had was liming.
Francis said he wanted the curfew to apply to people 30 years and younger because he found it too restrictive for more mature people who were not involved in crime.
Henry Kwame, 60, who has lived on Nelson Street all his life, said the curfew and State of Emergency have dramatically slowed down the robberies and assaults in the area.
"Whatever the curfew and SoE has done, I feel pleased about because before I wasn't walking places because of what was going on. A lot of things was happening and now it kind of cool down. Recently we saw a fist fight when normally those fellas would use a gun," he said.
Kwame said the showing of the CCTV coverage had also helped to deter some of the troublemakers in the area because they now realise they would be caught.
"I never used to think it was working before I saw it on news but now them fellas are afraid. They cannot try holding up and robbing people again cause this time they will be in trouble. I didn't believe it was working but what I seeing for myself it working good," he said.
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/news/Nelson_Street_residents_speak_out-130046633.html
