THE Prime Minister has blamed the crime onslaught on this society's past failure to predict the crisis.
He was addressing a Caricom symposium at the Hyatt Regency, Port of Spain on Monday, titled Violence as a Public Health Issue – the Crime Challenge.
Dr Rowley said, "Violence in the Caribbean is a public health emergency which threatens our lives, our economies, our national security and by extension every aspect of our well-being."
He lamented the prevalence of petty theft, school violence, home invasions, domestic violence, sexual abuse, human trafficking, drive-by shootings, drug-gang warfare and revenge murders.
"When the situation arrives at the door, it is said there was a failure of the society to spot the oncoming crisis.
"Then there may be a later failure to perceive the extent of that arrived situation as a societal problem.
"Today, if there's one aspect we may all be guilty of (it) is that the problem of criminality and violence was not dealt with sufficiently in a much earlier timeframe – in the homes, in the schools, in the prisons, in the courts and I dare say in the Parliaments."
Rowley lamented the evolution of a creeping normalisation of lower standards.
"We allowed slow, moderate, deviant behavioural trends to increase.
"We allowed slips in our age-old standards, ethical and moral norms in our family homes, in our schools, in public institutions, and our roads and in public places – all of which, in hindsight, reminds us that we should have checked very early. Instead, we seem to have been saying, 'These times are different.'"
He mulled this age of American gun culture, amid the internet revolution with its tremendous promises and all its warts.
"An age of selfish individualism has been allowed to flourish, at the expense of society itself.
"So morals and values are now considered flexible. Their lines are blurred and they occupy spheres of their own, determined by one's personal whims, the present fashionable trends, and, worse, the political and bureaucratic shortcomings of something malleable called 'the system.'"
Rowley said with a cross-section of Caribbean inputs, the conference would try to address the issue of crime and violence as a public health issue.
"Hopefully, there will be elements of operational consensus, after the planned examination and exchanges, which will form a plan of action that will give the Caribbean people their much-needed assurance that something beyond talk will be done, using the same plans, programmes and strategic methods that were adopted to confront the deadly challenges of covid19."
Earlier, the PM noted three ministers of national security, five under the former People's Partnership government and one under the Patrick Manning administration, to say that crime has not abated and that it did not depend on individual ministers, in a seeming defence of Minister of National Security Fitzgerald Hinds.
Noting 5,439 murders in Trinidad and Tobago from 2011-2022, including 600 last year, he said the homicide death toll was overtaken
