I saw a tweet saying what happens if we defund the police, so I gonna try my best to answer that in a Trinidadian context. I’m no expert so I speaking off what I know which may be limited so if you see anything wrong with what I say please let me know

So the long and short of defunding the police is that we would use the funds that would ordinarily go into the police service to better the country to the point where a police service would be redundant, as in the success of the society acts as its own crime deterrent.

Primary thing to note is that, we can’t police our way out of a crime situation. That doesn’t work. Police shootings have increased 86% and we yet to see any change in crime, it simply don’t work like that.

So with that in mind, offices such as the Min. of Nat. Security and the CoP are given a bit too much weighting in the public eye imo, seeing as year after year we see that they aren’t the real ones with the power to stop crime at its source, at least in its current form.

I think a lot more funding and weight should be prioritized to the Ministry of Social Development. They need to be given an adequate budget and facilities to research the causes of these issues and implement solutions in coordination with the other Ministries, namely Education.

Now I not gonna talk about SEA and prestige school syndrome because I think we could all agree it’s wrong and we should have well funded government schools in each given area. Not taking any debates on this.

But we also need to go further and that’s where I think Social Dev and Education should collaborate and really further a lot of things but the simplest one to come to mind is better provision of IT services to many communities. (And no K*ml*, I don’t mean sharing out laptops)

What about computer labs in the community centers? (Or separate) complete with technicians and teachers and after hours assistants to help both youths and adults with whatever they may need from the Internet for research, projects, online forms etc.

Now defunding the police isn’t fully enough for all of this but to spin off a bit, let’s talk about the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) branch of the Ministry of Finance. I think they are another group with REAL power to stop crime as opposed to the police.

The FIU is the group responsible for investigating money laundering and terror financing but I don’t know how far this stretches. I’d hope that they get full authority to conduct investigations into any and all financial irregularities and white collar crimes in the nation.

I’d first say that I think they should actually be treated as a completely separate, INDEPENDENT entity, as detached as possible from all political spheres. I think they should have authority to conduct independent audits of ALL government projects to prevent the kickbacks etc.

The politicians, the big businesses, other business esp. like the casinos and bars and all these places should have to submit to the microscope of a dedicated INDEPENDENT financial crime unit if suspected of wrongdoing.

Serious fine-toothed comb INDEPENDENT financial accountability is (imo) one of the most promising ways we can actually tackle the guns and drug trade in the country at the very top, because tackling it anywhere else makes little sense.

So yeah, gradually defund the police, place emphasis on social development and an independent Financial Intelligence Unit, because the white collar crime keeps the whole thing going and a traditional police force mired in bureaucracy in incapable of combating it.