CAN initiatives in the 2023/2024 national budget help to reduce crime, mulled several business organisations ahead of Monday's presentation by Finance Minister Colm Imbert. The hopes come after a week where the country has been stunned by the assassination of a 13-year-old rape victim due to testify against her assailant and by the murder of four children at home in the Heights of Guanapo, Arima.
The Trinidad and Tobago Chamber of Industry and Commerce recently called for donations to the police service and Crime Stoppers to boost the fight against crime.
In its budget recommendations on its website, the chamber proposed hefty tax breaks for donations from individuals and organisations to the police and Crime Stoppers for operational and infrastructural support. It proposed "a tax deduction of 100 per cent for donations up to $1,000,000 for a defined period."
The Greater Tunapuna Chamber of Industry and Commerce (GTCIC) wanted tax-breaks towards funding a community collaboration against crime.
'Our membership continues to grapple with crime in the form of robbery, larceny, and the penultimate liability of an out-of-control murder rate.
'The time has come to meaningfully boost community involvement with public-private partnerships.
'Tax incentives should be presented to the private sector to increase this type of activity. This is a model GTCIC has followed and it has yielded positive outcomes in the form of our SOS system currently being piloted in the Tunapuna area."
Urging a holistic approach at the community level, the Tunapuna chamber said, "We firmly believe the police service cannot do it alone.'
Senator Jayanti Lutchmedial, at a UNC pre-budget consultation on Saturday in Marabella, noted that national security receives the largest cut of the budget.
"I shadow law and national security, crime has taken up the largest portion of the budget for many years. To have five children in our morgues in one week, to me, as a mother, it breaks my heart."
She called for a more-efficient management of the various arms of the law-enforcement and judicial apparatus.
"How are we managing the criminal justice system, because this involves victim management, management of offenders, rehabilitation of offenders, prison system, and raising the detection rate. Our detection rate is abysmal.
"In the country, there is an even worse conviction rate, the reason being we are treating and dealing with and investigating and prosecuting crime in 2023 like it's 1983 - not using CCTV, not using DNA."
Lutchmedial lamented that under the current system, people were waiting upwards of six months to get forensic results, so as to identify bodies, and waiting all that time to bury their loved ones.
"These are some of the challenges we experience as a country."
Amidst the calls for incisive tax breaks and spending, Imbert must surely mull his balance sheet.
Amid a clamour for a higher minimum wage and relief for all levels of society - businessman, middle-class and low-paid - lies the reality of last y
