T&T Held Hostage by Poverty and Politics
Trinidad and Tobago can’t arrest its way out of a crisis it keeps financing, excusing, and postponing
“Poverty is the mother of crime” is easy to say and hard to face, because it forces a second, more uncomfortable question: who benefits when poverty persists? In Trinidad and Tobago, crime has become a national trauma, but poverty remains the quiet, consistent engine feeding it, year after year, community after community, administration after administration.
This is not about romanticising criminality or pretending people aren’t responsible for their choices. It is about acknowledging that when a country normalises deprivation, especially child poverty, crime doesn’t arrive like a surprise visitor. It grows like weeds in neglected ground.
Strongholds that never seem to progress
Decades after Eric Williams laid the political foundations of modern Trinidad and Tobago, many areas widely seen as long-standing PNM strongholds still struggle with the same basics: unreliable water, inconsistent electricity, poor road infrastructure, and limited access to stable employment. A serious country has to ask why communities represented for generations can remain so persistently underdeveloped.
Development is not an occasional coat of paint or a last-minute road patch before a public meeting. It is consistent public services, functioning schools, reliable utilities, and a realistic path to work that does not depend on political patronage. When those fundamentals are absent for decades, poverty stops looking accidental and starts looking structural.
The politics of short-term work and long-term dependence
For decades, state “work programmes” appeared to replace a real employment strategy. Many citizens recall the standard: ten days cutting grass, clearing drains, painting road edges, small money for a short window, and then back to the same uncertainty. Such programmes can offer temporary relief, but they cannot substitute for skills training, job placement, apprenticeships, and industries that actually hire.
More troubling are persistent allegations from the public space that contracts were channelled through gang leaders, while regular payments made their way upward to ministers. Even where citizens cannot produce courtroom-grade proof, the logic of the outcome is visible: when criminal figures become gatekeepers to state resources, they gain legitimacy, cashflow, and influence. That is how gangs stop being a “police problem” and become embedded in the political economy.
And now that at least one such programme has been shut down, the vacuum remains. Ending a flawed initiative is not the same as replacing it with credible opportunity. If vulnerable young men are left with fewer legal options and the same living conditions, the street will offer what the state does not.
The child poverty figure should terrify us
Central Bank reporting has indicated that more than 40% of children live in poverty. That number should break the country’s complacency. Child poverty is not just hardship, it is a forecast. It predicts school underperformance, early dropouts, recruitment vulnerability, trauma, and a permanent underclass that learns from early that the “straight path” rarely pays on time.
No, poverty does not automatically produce criminals. But large-scale poverty produces large-scale vulnerability, and gangs are professional exploiters of vulnerability. They offer income, identity, protection, and status, especially in communities where legitimate systems feel distant, slow, or corrupt.
Murders, stray bullets, and the collapse of “safe at home”
More than 5,000 murders in recent years is not a trendline, it is an erosion of national life. The demographic reality is painful: a large share of victims are young, and a significant portion are African. Add the most horrifying feature of all: children struck by stray bullets inside their homes. When bedrooms are no longer safe, the country is not merely “experiencing crime.” It is experiencing social breakdown.
At that stage, the national conversation cannot be reduced to which minister is “tough” or which slogan sounds strongest. Public safety becomes a basic condition of citizenship, and citizens are currently living without it in T&T.
After the SOE: what happens when the pressure lifts?
With the State of Emergency now expired, many people fear the rebound effect. If murders were falling under heightened measures, the question becomes what follows when those measures end, especially if key gang figures return to the streets quickly due to weak cases, frightened witnesses, or compromised investigations.
The public doesn’t need drama to understand cause and effect. When gangs regroup, communities feel it first: extortion lists, home invasions, retaliation shootings, drug activity, and kidnappings. Leadership matters, yes, but no leader can compensate for institutions that do not consistently detect, investigate, prosecute, and convict.
When uniforms appear in the crime story, trust collapses
Nothing corrodes confidence faster than allegations involving those sworn to protect the public. Arrests of police officers, Coast Guard officers, and military personnel in connection with criminal activity do more than shock the headlines, they plant doubt in every citizen who calls for help.
Reports that ammunition marked from state entities ends up on the streets raise an even darker question: are official supply chains being penetrated, exploited, or deliberately bled? If multiple agencies appear unable to explain how state-stamped rounds circulate in criminal networks, citizens are left to choose between incompetence and complicity. Either answer is unacceptable.
Schools cannot be recruitment zones
Trinidad and Tobago should never have reached a point where it feels plausible to describe schools as recruitment grounds for gangs. But when poverty is deep, institutions are weak, and violence is normalised, criminal groups fill the role of employer and protector, especially for boys who feel disposable to the wider society.
The fix is not only raids and roadblocks. It requires opportunity with teeth: technical training tied to actual jobs, apprenticeships with private-sector buy-in, functioning social services, early intervention for at-risk youth, and a justice system that can secure convictions without placing the entire burden on terrified witnesses.
Criticism isn’t racism—results are results
One of the laziest habits in our politics is to dismiss criticism as racial hostility. If someone condemns government performance and is told they “hate” a leader because he is African, that is not analysis, it is an attempt to silence accountability. Governments should be judged by outcomes: poverty levels, murder rates, institutional integrity, and whether communities are improving or deteriorating.Elections tell us who wins power. They do not settle whether that power was used well.
Trinidad and Tobago cannot arrest its way out of a crisis that is fundamentally social, economic, and institutional. If we want less crime, we must fight poverty like a national security threat, and stop treating long-suffering communities as political assets to be managed rather than citizens to be developed. Until then, we will keep repeating the same shocked lines after every tragedy, while the underlying machinery continues to run.
The recent shooting in a kids park tells a sad story as kids were scampering away from bullets, they will never be the same ...What have you become T&T: I hardly recognize thee any more...
Sarge