If you ask any Trinidadian, at home or abroad, to name the number one issue facing our nation today, odds are, they’ll say it’s crime. We never shut up about it. Shootings, robberies, home invasions—it’s all anyone (including certain opportunistic social media personalities) can talk about these days. Crime is almost always the top story on the local evening news, and our national newspapers keep a gleeful tally of the murder toll. It’s not unusual to hear a radio news report begin with the line “the murder toll climbed to [insert staggering number here] this morning with the death of” before going on to describe the killing in gruesome detail.

It’s enough to give anyone the impression that Trinidadians are living under siege. I’m sure many us would definitely say we feel that way. But if you look closely, you’ll notice an interesting pattern in the way we discuss crime in this country. If you pay attention, it becomes clear that when we say “crime,” we actually mean crime*. And that asterisk? It’s hiding some very important details.

Our Favourite Type of Crime*

The most glaring detail is that, when we say we’re concerned about crime, we mean violent crime. But it’s not just the loss of life or property that’s bothering us, because otherwise we’d be making more noise about all the drunk driving and the increasingly frequent road fatalities. And we’d definitely be up in arms over the periodic waves of domestic (and State) violence stealing a heartbreaking number of women and children from us.

No, our favourite type of crime is “gang-related.” Because, unlike in the case of traffic and domestic crimes, we’re not implicated in them. We might run a lil red light or leave a few welts on our children now and again, but we’re not out there robbing people at gunpoint or shooting up neighbourhoods, so it’s cool. We can still call ourselves (mostly) law-abiding citizens. When we focus on “gang-related” crime, we can choose to ignore the circular definition enshrined in our legislation:

“gang” means a combination of two or more persons, whether formally or informally organized [sic], who engage in gang-related activity;

“gang leader” means a person who initiates, organizes [sic], plans, finances, directs, manages or supervises a gang;

“gang member” means a person who belongs to a gang, or associates himself with a gang-related activity;

“gang-related activity” means any of the offences listed in the First Schedule which a gang leader or gang member plans, directs, orders, authorizes, or requests including:
(a) an attempt to commit the offence;
(b) the aiding, abetting, counselling or procuring of the offence; or
(c) conspiracy to commit the offence;

The Anti-Gang Act, 2021, p. 2

We can pretend that crime is something committed by other people (or, if you prefer, cockroaches and pests). And we can cheer when the police gun down anyone who fits the description—even if they had their hands in the air at the time.

While we moan about the increasing presence of guns on our streets and cameras on our T&TEC poles, we don’t bother to look too hard at where they came from. Because if we did, we might have to acknowledge the type of crime that too many of us can’t seem to see for what it is.

Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems

As billionaire Warren Buffet wrote in an aside in his chairman’s letter for Berskshire Hathaway in 2000, “More money […] has been stolen with the point of a pen than at the point of a gun.” I don’t know if he was the first to say it in those exact words, but I know he wasn’t the first to have the idea. After all, our very own Desmond Cartey, Minister of Industry, Commerce, and Consumer Affairs declared “All ah we thief!” way back in 1986.

Despite all the noise they like to make about what crime* is doing to our nation, an unsettling number of our politicians are allegedly very familiar with a particular subset of it. They may deplore “blue-collar” crime, but it would appear that at least some of them are quite comfortable with the “white-collar “variety. Other lawmakers walk a fine line, enriching themselves and their friends and family from the public purse, safe in the knowledge that—while it may not be ethical (especially if the ministries aren’t reporting it)—it certainly is legal. It’s cool, though. As the late former Prime Minister Basdeo Panday himself said, “politics has a morality of its own.“

This national love affair with economic shenanigans is how the nation’s largest supplier of toiletries could feel entitled to respond to a long-overdue minimum wage increase by deciding not to pay their workers for their lunch breaks. You know how boldfaced you have to be to call paid lunch a “perk” when a quarter of your staff is working for minimum wage? In 2024? When groceries calling $30 for a dozen eggs? That’s why the backlash was swift, and they had to pretend that the very deliberate decision informed by accountants and labour lawyers had been “inadvertently made.”

It wasn’t enough to really move the needle, though, and that’s why a distinguished economist responded with shock to the recent news about two prominent businessmen evading taxes for a total of 29 years to the tune of $127 million dollars. Not because that amount of tax evasion from businesses profiting off of public infrastructure is harmful to our economy (and RELL boldfaced too). No, it’s because if we, the people, are allowed to know about it, the admitted tax evaders might be in danger.

Unfortunately, a perplexing number of us “have nots” were also quite eager to dive in front of our favourite tax-dodging millionaires. Just as the general public began to question precisely how one gets away with skipping tax payments for decades, these caped crusaders emerged to remind us that, while the wheels of the public service procedures sure do grind slowly, they grind exceedingly fine. When the relevant public servants revealed that, actually, the government’s been understaffing them and then blaming them for the inevitable result, the daring heroes pivoted to claiming that it was actually an ouroboros of missing tax payments causing a lack of funding, leading to an inability to track down the missing tax payments in a timely fashion. When questions arose about why the Board of Inland Revenue (BIR) has been so quiet about who’s been hiding $15 billion in missing tax revenue, they argued that the BIR couldn’t possibly tell us anything because that would require them to share privileged tax information.

And that, my friends, brings us to the real point. While it’s true that the Ministry of Finance can’t go around exposing the tax details of private citizens and businesses all willy-nilly, they can (and do) publish the details of financial crimes such as tax evasion… sometimes. The thing is, they can’t publish the details of a crime if the alleged criminal was never charged in the first place.

To Charge or Not to Charge

Now, I eh no lawyer, but it seems to me that the Income Tax Act is quite clear when it comes to tax evasion:

Any person who—

[…]wilfully in any manner evades or attempts to
evade, compliance with this Act or payment of
taxes imposed by this Act;

[…]is guilty of an offence, and in addition to any penalty otherwise provided is liable on summary conviction to a fine of fifty thousand dollars and to imprisonment for three years.

Income Tax Act Chapter 75:01, 119.(1)(d) (p. 153-154)

However, the reports about the two evaders indicate that they’ve both managed to secure payment plans in lieu of charges despite flaunting the law for many years. It sure is interesting that one could withhold $93 million in taxes for 20 years and end up on a payment plan, when as little as $48,250 in stamp duties is enough for others to find themselves facing four warrants.

If I’ve learned nothing else over the past couple of weeks, it’s that the BIR works in mysterious ways.

Less mysterious is the connection between tax evasion and money laundering. Even less mysterious than that are the links between money laundering and all the crimes we do claim to care about, like human trafficking, arms trafficking, murder, robbery, and more.

Who knew the asterisk was hiding this much, eh?

The good news is that, if we’re really interested in tackling crime* in this place, we’ve long known exactly where to start.

As soon as we’re done LARPing in the streets of Port of Spain, that is.