THE EDITOR: The newspapers and other media made a meal of the tragedy in east Trinidad: the front pages screamed 'Bloodshed,' 'Massacre' and 'Bloodbath,' and the patient camels (the population) had yet another half-tonne beam dropped onto their already broken backs.

But that was on Thursday. What happens now? Having been bowled over by the wave of grief and horror at the new low of children being executed, what to do? I want to suggest that the first thing is to stop giving in to the hysteria, and to resist the ritual of diving into the orgy of hopelessness and self-immolation that follows.

When a victim of an accident arrives at the emergency room, the sight is usually a stomach-turning one. It is left to the medical professionals to look past the gore, and assess the underlying realities and the best way to treat them.

This clinical, disinterested perspective is missing from our troubles. I am a politician, and I am also a lawyer. My profession is built on looking at traumatic, often criminal acts dispassionately, and coming to logical conclusions. In this, I am not special: many, if not all professions - caregivers, journalists, teachers, sociologists - require this of their practitioners. However, this disinterested (though not un-interested) perspective is not the one we hear from all sides. There is a reason for this, which I will address in a moment.

For now, any thinking person in possession of the facts of our country knows with certainty the causes of the rise in crime: poverty which brings hopelessness and desperation, the involuntary embrace of 'gangsta' culture, on open display in Trinibad videos, and the collapse of institutions which solve these problems. The chief enabler of this complex of factors is an overworked, under-resourced, and disengaged TTPS, and its government controller, the Ministry of National Security.

This crippling of the TTPS is the one element that makes all the difference, and this did not happen by itself. One event turned a TTPS that was making slow but sure improvement of the crime problem into a chaotic failure: the Prime Minister's interference into the selection of a police commissioner. This signalled instability, and the selected candidates seemed more interested in pleasing the PNM than stopping crime. The criminal element saw this. The result? Escalating brazenness, and a sense of invulnerability among criminals.

This single event crystallises TT's dilemma. This is what has happened, and what continues to happen, everywhere. Leadership dismantles the institutions, like the TTPS, or Petrotrin, so they can have their way. The unintended, but predictable consequences of this, is the now-paralysed institution cannot perform its many other functions and the society sinks chaos. And this applies not only to the government: elsewhere, everywhere, we see the dismantling of social and political institutions for self-interest, which devastate the society for the benefit of a single or few individuals.

This is the character of the current leadership: it has no sym