The Caribbean republic of Trinidad and Tobago has announced a state of emergency in response to a spike in gang violence over the weekend.
The declaration grants police additional powers as they seek to tamp down on reprisal killings and other gang-related activity.
“The declaration and calling of a public state of emergency is something that is not taken lightly,” said acting Attorney General Stuart Young at a news conference on Monday.
He explained that information from the Trinidad and Tobago police service “dictated and mandated the necessity of this extreme action that we took this morning”.
The state of emergency empowers the country’s police to arrest people “on suspicion of involvement in illegal activities”. It will also allow law enforcement to “search and enter both public and private premises” and suspend bail.
A government statement specified that no curfew would be imposed, and the freedom to meet publicly or demonstrate in marches would not be impeded.
Young indicated that an uptick in violence over the weekend in the capital, Port of Spain, helped prompt the emergency announcement in the early hours of Monday.
“You will recall that on Saturday, just after 3 o’clock in the afternoon outside the Besson Street police station, there was a shooting with the use of a high-calibre automatic weapon,” Young explained.
Local media described the shooting as an ambush.
A suspected gang leader, Calvin Lee, had arrived at the police station to sign the bail book, but as he and his entourage left, The Daily Express reported that gunmen emerged from a nearby van and began to fire.
One person was killed. Lee himself managed to flee. But Young explained that the shooting led to reprisal killings between local gangs.
Within 24 hours, he said, six people were fired upon in Laventille, a suburb of Port of Spain. Five of them were killed. Young said further reprisal attacks are still anticipated.
“There can be expected heightened reprisal activities by the criminal elements in and around certain places in Trinidad and Tobago that immediately warranted and took us out of what we can consider the norm,” he explained.
He declined to name specific locations where gang activity may be concentrated.
“But I can say, throughout Trinidad and possibly Tobago, [criminal gangs] are likely to immediately increase their brazen acts of violence in reprisal shootings on a scale so extensive that it threatens persons and will endanger public safety.”
Young added that the decision to invoke a state of emergency was in part a result of the high-calibre weapons being used in the attacks, which elevated the possibility of bystander deaths.
He noted the involvement of AK-47 and AR-15 guns.
“Over the last month or so, and in fact building up to this, the government has been concerned about the use of high-powered, illegal firearms — high-calibre firearms including automatic weapons that unfortunately are a scourge throughout the whole Caribbean region,” Young said.
Caribbean countries do not manufacture firearms themselves, and many of the guns used in gang violence have been illegally imported.
One source in particular stands out: the United States. It is the largest weapons exporter in the world.
In March, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that the US was the source of approximately 42 percent of global arms exports.
A 2017 analysis from the Small Arms Survey also found that the US had the largest number of private guns per capita, with US civilians holding 40 percent of the world’s firearms.
Guns from the US have been connected to crimes across the Caribbean, from Haiti and Jamaica to Trinidad and Tobago.
The US has collaborated with 13 Caribbean countries to help disrupt the illegal firearms trade. Between 2018 and 2022, an estimated 7,399 firearms collected from crimes in the region have been sent to the US for origin tracing.
In October, the US Government Accountability Office published a report with its findings. Of all the firearms retrieved and traced during that four-year period, a total of 5,399 — or 73 percent — originated from the US. A couple hundred more had ambiguous origins.
The proliferation of illegal firearms has been linked to increased violence in the Caribbean. Trinidad and Tobago, for example, has been struggling with a record homicide rate.
In December alone, there were 61 homicides, according to the government. The country tallied 623 homicides total so far for 2024.
“Gangs accounted for 263 of them,” MP Fitzgerald Hinds, the minister of national security, said during Monday’s news conference.
“So as a result, we consider that this declaration of a public emergency is to confront the criminals and to allow law enforcement easier access than ordinary to them, in light of the crises they have presented to this country.”