Little of direct use

A Review By KEVIN BALDEOSINGH

Caribbean Journal of Criminology and Public Safety
Ramesh Deosaran (ed.)
The University of Trinidad and Tobago, January & July 2008.

Ramesh Deosaran

In the context of T&T, a journal of criminology cannot be judged by purely academic standards. Since crime is the foremost concern of citizens, and has been for the past decade or more, such a journal must first be judged by its relevance and then secondarily by its intellectual rigor. Also, since the publication has been financed by the UTT - i.e. by taxpayers’ dollars - the first consideration has an added dimension.
This 13th special volume has two unique features. First, its six papers are focused exclusively on T&T; and, secondly, it is written entirely by teams of foreign academics (sociologist Derek Chadee being the lone exception, in a paper on fear of gang crime co-authored with American Jodi Lane). The other subjects covered are: crime hotspots; excessive use of force by police officers; youth perception of the police; treatment of mentally ill persons by police; and crimes against tourists. These, of course, are not the actual titles of the papers, nor the order in which they are presented in the journal.
The editorial written by Ramesh Deosaran is titled “The Enigma of a Caribbean Criminology”, and he notes that Caribbean criminological theory remains an open field. “Would the crime and violence data themselves be able to create theoretical perspectives far different from what is traditionally known in criminology as, for example, routine activities, differential association, anomie and strain, rational choice, containment or neutralisation, labelling or even conflict theory?” In the Introduction, written by Americans Edward R. Maguire and Richard R. Bennett, the assertion is made that “The failure to take advantage of existing scientific evidence is a major roadblock to implementing effective reform in criminal justice.”
Here, then, is the core question: does this journal provide data which can be used to reduce T&T’s runaway crime? The paper titled “Spatial Concentration of Violence”, which has four authors, would seem to have a useful focus. “The criminological literature on hot spots or spatial concentrations rests on an intellectual foundation that is comprised largely of three theories of crime: social disorganisation, collective efficacy, and routine activities,” the authors explain. The first hypothesis posits differing “zones” in urban centres, with the oldest areas typically having the most crime; the second is based on a correlation between high crime and sparse social capital (i.e. weak social networks in the community); and the third posits that crime is more likely when there are motivated offenders, vulnerable victims, and ineffectual guardians (of people and property). The authors examined hot spots in Trinidad to see if these ideas from metropolitan societies also applied here.
The hot spots identified will not be news to any concerned citizen: by police district, they were Besson Street, Morvant, West End, Belmont, Arima, St James, and Carenage. “Together these seven districts had about 60% of the homicides, though they constituted only 9.9% of the station districts in the nation, 39.7% of the population, and 6.1% of the land mass,” the authors write. They also found that nearly three-quarters of murder victims are Afro-Trinidadian, 18 percent Indo, 7.6 percent mixed, and 1.4% other. Then, in order to show off their expertise, the authors perform a statistical analysis using t-tests and z-tests, finding significance for victim demographics, motive, weapon type, and time of day. These findings, however, are entirely unnecessary to prove that “homicides occurring in areas where violence is spatially concentrated are qualitatively different than homicides occurring in areas where violence is less frequent” - especially to the victims.
The authors conclude that the metropolitan theories do not apply to Trinidad. However, they argue that their findings have policy implications, in that police and other agencies can implement “targeted interventions”. Although there is useful data in this study, this recommendation is a non sequitur since it assumes that the unidentified causal factors are hermetic and that the human agents of violence won’t have adaptive responses. In fact, the crime pattern of the past four months, in which murders have become more spatially wide-ranging, suggests that targeted interventions have had minimal impact.
Lane and Chadee’s paper on fear of gang crime suffers from a similar over-reliance on statistical equations. Addressing the questions as to which racial group felt more at risk, what precautions they took, and how people in high-crime areas compared to those in lower-crime areas, the authors present several pages of T-tests. Their paper is a textbook example of mistaking a mathematical result for a real-world one (or, economists Stephen T. Ziliak and Deirdre McCloskey put it in The Cult of Statistical Significance, “Fit is not the same as importance”.) And, though they are professional enough to admit that their sample was not representative (respondents being older and better-off than the general populace) Lane and Chadee did not think to adjust their equations even then. No wonder, then, they reach a paradoxical conclusion that “There were no significant differences across ethnic groups in perceived risk, but Indo-Trinidadians and Mixed Race respondents were significantly more afraid than Afro-Trinidadians of most of the gang crimes.” What could that mean, psychologically? Than although two persons judged a risk equally likely, one was more afraid than the other? And, if so, what is the significance of that to crime reduction? Where Lane’s and Chadee’s paper is useful is in revealing the differing value systems of Indos and Afros, but this is pertinent for cultural, not criminological, analyses.
Seemingly more relevant in light of recent events in Laventille are the papers on excessive use of force and of youth perception of the police. Readers will recall the case of a young man who was allegedly taken by police to another gang area and beaten up, and the stark visual images captured by reporter Marcia Henville and her Gayelle camera crew of policemen shooting blindly into the hillside and throwing tear-gas grenades into a crowd, as well as their armed presence when residents protested because of the lack of action on abducted10-year-old Tecia Henry, who was eventually found murdered.
The authors of the excessive force paper also indulge in empty statistical correlations, finding that informal methods of dealing with police deviance trump formal avenues; that the extent of the crime did not affect the use of force; that job satisfaction had no bearing on using excessive force. No wonder, then, that “The overall finding [is] that the model explained little of the variance in constables’ perceptions regarding the excessive use of force…” The recommendations thus end up being trite: “the rank and file must be persuaded to forego informal handling of infractions” and “the administration must take and handle such complaints about excessive force seriously”. Similarly, the youth perception paper is unnecessarily technical, using multiple regression for what is basically a simple opinion survey which found  that “young people in Trinidad have a relatively negative view of the police, regardless of whether they are asked about service quality, fairness of treatment, or police misconduct.”
Thus, there is little in this journal which is directly useful in the fight against crime in T&T. At the same time, much of the data can be utilised for a better understanding of the attitudes and social mores of the people and, if researchers meld this to social psychology, initiatives which would help lessen social disorder could well suggest themselves.