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.