If a State of Emergency (SoE) is the government’s only means of addressing spiralling crime, the real emergency might be unfolding in the Red House.

The week between Christmas and New Year’s is supposed to be a liminal space where time isn’t real and nothing meaningful happens because the old year is pretty much done and the new one eh quite reach yet. That’s probably part of the reason why the nation blearily reacted to the news that the Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago (GORTT) decided to place us under an SOE with various versions of “Allyuh fuh real?”

The other part might have something to do with the fact that they chose to break the news with the briefest of social media posts, withholding many of the relevant details for two hours, but what yuh go do?

For those of us who pay consistent attention to national developments, this news might have come with a wave of déjà vu, given how closely it followed a mass shooting believed to be a reprisal killing. After all, our last crime-related SoE was announced in the wake of a spate of murders, and we all know how that turned out.

At the eventual press conference helmed by Energy Minister Stuart Young (holding on for Attorney General Reginal Armour) and National Security Minister Fitzgeral Hinds (who has been uncharacteristically quiet lately), we learned that the government had indeed reacted to the overnight shooting (and intelligence suggesting that it wouldn’t be the last) by curtailing the nation’s constitutional rights.

Though Young went to great pains to reassure us that they had no intention of hurting the economy (no curfew), what they do intend to do is concerning enough to anyone who remembers how the 2011 SoE unfolded.

Here’s the thing about granting enhanced arrest powers to the T&T Police Service (TTPS) and T&T Defense Force (TTDF) (in tandem with warrantless searches of private premises and the suspension of bail applications and habeus corpus): it gives the authorities license to disappear anyone they like for an unconfirmed period if they think that person may have been or plans to be involved in illegal activities.

Of course, Young emphatically assured “law-abiding citizens” that we have nothing to fear from this suspension of our constitutional rights because the TTPS and TTDF will be focusing solely on specific suspects relating to a specific gang war. And that might be reassuring if the government hadn’t opted to suspend everyone’s rights in order to, they claim, focus on specific individuals in specific areas. It’s also considerably less comforting when you think about what the TTPS gets up to even without these expanded powers and the difficulties that law-abiding citizens already have in telling the cops apart from the criminals.

Beyond all of that, what’s most concerning about this SoE are the questions it raises about the government’s approach to tackling crime. For example:

1. If they already have legitimate information about reprisal shootings (including knowledge of the specific individuals involved), why do they need to suspend protections like warrants, bail, and habeus corpus in order to take action?
2. If they can’t act on the intelligence they have without suspending constitutional protections designed to prevent abuse of power, then what happens when those rights are restored?
3. If this SoE isn’t intended to finally tackle the rampant importation of high-powered weaponry and target the individuals putting them on our streets, then how does it help to address our spiralling crime situation (and why did Hinds spend so much time rambling about those weapons)?
4. Is the TTPS capable of enforcing the law and addressing crime within the bounds of the constitution?

Essentially, the decision to use a short-term, broad-based measure to tackle a specific instance of a long-standing issue implies that they’re out of effective options. Because if the government needs to suspend our rights in order to protect us, we have much bigger problems than an individual gang war.

(But you don’t have to take my word for it. Just recall that our current Prime Minister—on whose advice the President declared this SoE—described the 2011 version as a panic response to the then government’s failure to address the crime situation.)