00:00Criminologist, author, social researcher and analyst, Darius Figueroa tells The Morning Edition that police statistics show Afro-Trinidadians are disproportionately
00:12represented among offenders of crime, as well as who the crime is targeted toward.
00:19The principal victims are members of their own race. So those who insist that Africa is a criminal threat to
00:34their race, that is a false, mythic discourse.
00:39Figueroa argues that today's criminal landscape is rooted in the expansion of the illicit drug trade during the 1970s, saying
00:49foreign criminal networks helped reshape organized crime and fuel the evolution of gangs, particularly along the East-West Corridor.
00:59And this illicit business model was allowed to thrive because of the failure of the politicians and the non-elected
01:11politicians who run the TGPS. It went through four stages of evolution, unchecked, until it reached its third stage where
01:26it evolved gangland.
01:28He further tells The Morning Edition that social and economic inequality has contributed to the cycle of crime.
01:35He further maintains that states of emergency and ZOSOs alone will not solve the problem because, he says, key underlying
01:44issues like transnational crime remain unaddressed.
01:48As long as transnational organized crime continues to enjoy impunity in Trinidad and Tobago, it is going to find a
01:58means for the displaced to live their criminal lifestyle.
02:04No matter how you suppress it and try to suppress it to rural states of emergency and ZOSOs, it does
02:12not because you are not going to the source of the cancer while the cancer is metastasizing.
02:22Nicole M. Romany, TB6 News.
Comments