By Corneilus George
When Allister Guevarro claims that Trinidad and Tobago’s real problem is not crime itself, but merely the fear of crime, he doesn’t just misread the national mood; he dangerously misdiagnoses a nation in crisis. Here, fear is not irrational; it is earned.
Fear takes root when three people are murdered in less than six hours across Belmont, San Juan, and Valencia. It is reinforced when a father is gunned down before his nine-year-old son at Queen’s Park Savannah, a place meant to symbolise community, not carnage. It is cemented when a vibrant nine-year-old girl is struck down in a hail of bullets meant for others. These are not mere perceptions; these are grim realities. To dismiss these as mere “fear” is to ask citizens to distrust the evidence of their own eyes.
Even under a State of Emergency, the State’s most extreme tool, the data tells a story that no amount of rhetorical spin can erase. The murder toll remains in the triple digits, hovering between 118 and 124 over a comparable period. These are not abstract statistics; each number marks a rupture: a family shattered, a community destabilised, and a nation further desensitized.
Worse, violence is no longer confined to gang enclaves or the criminal underworld. This is the most chilling evolution of Trinidad and Tobago’s crime landscape: it is diffuse, unpredictable, and increasingly indiscriminate.
A 72-year-old attorney and his family are tied up in their own home as masked men ransack their property. In Longdenville, a woman endures 45 minutes of terror, bound and threatened with death, in a home invasion so brazen that security systems and physical barriers are rendered meaningless. A government senator is followed from a bank and robbed within minutes, exposing an organised criminal ecosystem that tracks, targets, and strikes with chilling precision. What exactly are citizens supposed to feel in the face of this, Mr Commissioner? Calm? Confidence?
The Commissioner insists that crime is trending downward, citing marginal year-over-year differences in homicides. But this is where statistical framing becomes a political tool, detached from lived experience. A drop from 127 murders to 118 does not mean safety; it simply means the breakdown is happening at a slightly slower rate. Citizens do not experience crime as a percentage point; they experience it as proximity.
They experience it when gunfire erupts on Lady Young Road, when criminals burst into bedrooms at 2:30 a.m., and when neighbours whisper instead of testify because “if you say too much, you can be killed.” This is not paranoia. It is a rational adaptation to a hostile environment.
Perhaps most damning is that even the State’s most aggressive posture, emergency powers, has failed to deter crime. Residents admit that States of Emergency are now so routine that criminals act as if nothing has changed, seemingly immune to the threat. That single fact should shatter the entire “fear versus reality” argument. If extraordinary powers cannot suppress violence, then the problem is not perception; it is structural failure.
There is also a moral dimension to this narrative that cannot be ignored. When leaders reframe crime as a problem of perception, they subtly shift responsibility away from the State and onto ordinary citizens. It implies that public fear is excessive, even harmful, and that it distorts the national image, damages the economy, and undermines cooperation with law enforcement. But fear is not the cause of non-cooperation. Fear is the consequence of exposure without protection.
When communities believe that speaking out could cost them their lives, silence becomes self-preservation. When investigations yield no arrests, when suspects vanish into forests, and when justice is delayed or denied, public trust erodes, and without trust, no policing strategy—grid patrols, fusion centres, or fleets of new vehicles—can succeed.
The truth is uncomfortable but necessary: Trinidad and Tobago is not suffering from an epidemic of fear; it is suffering from an ecosystem of violence that has outpaced the State’s ability to control it. Until that truth is acknowledged, every policy response will be built on a flawed foundation.
The public does not need to be told their fear is exaggerated; they need to see their lives genuinely protected. They need to see murder rates not just plateau but collapse; home invasions not just reported but prevented; perpetrators not just pursued but convicted.
Until then, fear will persist, not as hysteria, but as a rational, data-backed response to a daily, lived reality across this country because in Trinidad and Tobago today, fear is not the problem; fear is the evidence.
