Trinidad and Tobago announces state of emergency to fight gang violence | News about gun violence

The Caribbean Republic of Trinidad and Tobago has announced a state of emergency in response to a spike in gang violence over the weekend.

The declaration gives police additional powers as they seek to curb reprisal killings and other gang-related activity.

“The declaration and invocation of a public state of emergency is not something to be taken lightly,” Acting Attorney General Stuart Young said at a news conference on Monday.

He explained that information from the Trinidad and Tobago police “dictated and ordered the necessity of this extreme action that we took this morning”.

The state of emergency authorizes the country’s police to arrest people “suspected of involvement in illegal activities”. It would also allow law enforcement to “search and enter both public and private premises” and suspend bail.

A government statement specified that curfews would not be imposed and the freedom to meet in public or demonstrate in marches would not be hindered.

Young indicated that a spike in weekend violence in the capital, Port of Spain, helped prompt the emergency declaration in the early hours of Monday.

“You will recall that on Saturday, just after 3 o’clock in the afternoon outside the Besson Street police station, there was a shooting involving a high-caliber automatic weapon,” Young explained.

Local media described the shooting as an ambush.

A suspected gang leader, Calvin Lee, had arrived at the police station to sign the bail book, but as he and his entourage left, The Daily Express reported, gunmen got out of a nearby van and started shooting.

One person was killed. Lee himself managed to escape. But Young explained that the shooting led to retaliation killings between local gangs.

Within 24 hours, he said, six people were shot in Laventille, a suburb of Port of Spain. Five of them were killed. Young said further retaliation is still expected.

“Increased reprisals can be expected from the criminal elements in and around certain places in Trinidad and Tobago who immediately justified and took us out of what we might consider the norm,” he explained.

He declined to name specific locations where gang activity may be concentrated.

“But I can say that throughout Trinidad and possibly Tobago, (criminal gangs) are likely to immediately increase their brazen acts of violence in retaliation on a scale so extensive that it threatens individuals and will endanger public safety.”

Young added that the decision to invoke a state of emergency was partly a result of the high-caliber weapons used in the attacks, which increased the possibility of bystander deaths.

He noted the involvement of AK-47 and AR-15 guns.

“Over the last month or so, and really leading up to this, the government has been concerned about the use of high-powered, illegal firearms – high-caliber firearms including automatic weapons, which unfortunately are a scourge throughout the Caribbean region, Young said.

Caribbean countries not manufacture firearms themselves, and many of the weapons used in gang violence have been illegally imported.

One source in particular stands out: the United States. It is the largest arms exporter in the world.

In March, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that the United States was the source of approximately 42 percent of global arms exports.

A 2017 analysis from the Small Arms Survey also found that the United States had the largest number of private guns per per capita, where American civilians had 40 percent of the world’s firearms.

Weapons from the United States have been linked to crimes across the Caribbean, from Haiti and Jamaica to Trinidad and Tobago.

The United States has partnered with 13 Caribbean countries to help disrupt the illegal firearms trade. Between 2018 and 2022, an estimated 7,399 firearms collected from crimes in the region have been sent to the United States for origin tracking.

In October, the US Government Accountability Office published a report with its findings. Of all the firearms retrieved and traced during the four-year period, a total of 5,399 — or 73 per cent – originates from the USA. A few hundred more had ambiguous origins.

The proliferation of illegal firearms has been linked to increased violence in the Caribbean. Trinidad and Tobago, for example, has struggled with a record homicide rate.

According to the government, there were 61 murders in December alone. The country counted a total of 623 homicides so far for 2024.

“Gangs made up 263 of them,” MP Fitzgerald Hinds, the minister for national security, said during Monday’s press conference.

“So as a result, we believe this declaration of a public emergency is to confront the criminals and give law enforcement easier access than usual to them in light of the crises they have presented to this country.”