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On March 3, Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar once again draped our nation in the suffocating cloak of a State of Emergency. Barely one month after the previous SoE expired on January 31st, she rushed to suspend our constitutional rights, citing “credible intelligence” of vague threats supposedly emanating from the prison system—gang reprisals and mass shootings planned from behind bars. No names. No dates. No specific plots. No evidence presented to the population. Nothing. Just the same tired, opaque phrase we have heard for years.
It appears that a handful of hardened criminals locked inside our prisons can intimidate the entire Trinidad and Tobago Police Service and the Government of the Republic into locking down the whole country. This is not leadership. This is the desperate flailing of a regime that has run out of ideas, out of excuses, and out of credibility. The SoE is no longer a temporary tool—it has become the default crutch of a Government too incompetent to fix the police, too arrogant to admit defeat, and too dangerous to democracy to be allowed to continue.
This is not Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s first rodeo with emergency powers as a supposed crime-fighting measure. During her first term as Prime Minister from 2010 to 2015, she declared a limited State of Emergency on August 21, 2011, targeting crime hotspots amid a surge in gang violence and drug-related killings.
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