A while back, I wrote a post about the fantastical thinking that appears to be gripping Trinidad and Tobago’s elite. I referred to the kind of thinking that enables them to insulate themselves from the impacts of the decisions they make while chastising those who will actually pay the price. In that piece, I imagined my own fantasy land, one where our leadership is required to directly experience the impacts of their decisions. I listed 10 laws that would exist in that lovely land, seven of which applied directly to specific ministries. Obviously, I didn’t cover them all because T&T has quite a few ministries (though Culture and Tourism are somehow confined to one—though I digress), and I quite deliberately omitted a major one: National Security.

Not long afterwards, an observant reader asked if, perhaps, I omitted it because safety is a default setting in La La Land. I answered the question directly at the time, but it never left my mind. As our murder toll continues to climb (and our National Security Minister engages in some… interesting misdirection), I wonder if we’ll ever get around to envisioning an approach to addressing our spiralling crime rate that doesn’t amount to cheering for extrajudicial killers. Given that it’s inhumane and ineffective (our Homicide Bureau is literally overwhelmed by how ineffectual it is and students are regularly cowering under their desks hiding from gunshots in neighbourhoods we don’t care about), perhaps we can use our imaginations to make our crime-fighting dreams come true. We wouldn’t even have to imagine that hard, given that other nations (ones less focused on punishment and more focused on results) have already set some pretty good examples.

Let’s see how those strategies could play out in our favourite fantasy land.

First of all, La La Land would indeed have a Ministry of National Security, but it wouldn’t be a billion-dollar exercise in bullets and bluster. It would be responsible for supporting all the other ministries engaged in making sure our populace was adequately fed, housed, cared for and educated while also ensuring that our national defence services (from the police to the army) were properly trained, equipped and held accountable to the people they swore to serve. In other words, it would be a “whole of government approach” in practice, as well as in words.

For in La La Land, people who are handed authority are expected to be better than the people they serve. Especially if that authority comes with weapons and the ability to use force against others. What I mean by that is that our politicians wouldn’t waste their time cracking jokes about enslavement or poisoning because they’d be too busy doing their sworn duty: you know, doing “right to all manner of people, without fear or favour, affection or ill-will“. That would include weeding out corruption within their ministries, given that they would be held responsible for fraud, bribery and other forms of corruption happening under their tenure. So, naturally, our armed forces wouldn’t be allowed to kill unarmed men and their leaders wouldn’t be running around referring to citizens of this nation as “cockroaches“.

In such a land, our crime rate wouldn’t be breaking national records every year. Why not? Well, a funny thing happens to your crime rate when you fight corruption and ensure that large portions of your population aren’t desperate for food, shelter or employment. It drops. It turns out that the safest places in the real world are those where the leadership doesn’t get to do whatever it wants while treating its constituents like spoiled children. Oddly enough, it seems that places that incarcerate large swathes of their population aren’t on that list. Go figure.

So naturally, we wouldn’t be about that life in La-La Land.

Would it be crime-free? Of course not. It’s fantasy land, but it’s populated by humans, after all.

Would we be pretending to be in a state of perpetual war with inhuman savages we refer to as “criminals”?

Nah. We have better things to do, like improving conditions so people aren’t forced to turn to crime out of desperation and addressing the issues that we’ve long known can encourage people to head that way. Will we hold people accountable? Sure! We’d begin with those at the top and let it ‘trickle down‘ to the rest of us. In fact, I think “Accountability” would be one of our national watchwords, just to make sure we don’t forget it. But did you know that accountability doesn’t require us to treat people in inhumane ways, thereby perpetuating the very violence we claim we want to end? Wild. So yeah, we’d try rehabilitation instead of retribution, because it turns out that when you punish people and then stigmatise them indefinitely, they tend to return to the behaviours they went to jail for in the first place.

By now, it should be obvious that national security is a complicated and nuanced matter that can’t be “solved” with a neverending supply of bullets.

We can’t shoot our way out of this one, folks. Are we ready to imagine something different?