AG: Government to introduce ‘zones of special operations’

Gov­ern­ment has sig­nalled its in­ten­tion to fol­low the ex­am­ple of Ja­maica and in­tro­duce Zones of Spe­cial Op­er­a­tions (ZOSOs), as the coun­try seeks to take ad­van­tage of the re­duc­tion in mur­ders and oth­er crimes dur­ing a State of Emer­gency (SoE) that is ex­pect­ed to end on Jan­u­ary 31, 2026.

Ja­maica es­tab­lished ZOSOs un­der the 2017 Spe­cial Se­cu­ri­ty and Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment Mea­sures Act, to tack­le high crime in spe­cif­ic ar­eas through en­hanced se­cu­ri­ty and com­mu­ni­ty de­vel­op­ment and reg­u­lar­ly ex­tend­ed by Par­lia­ment.

Speak­ing on Wednes­day (Jan­u­ary 14, 2026) at a news con­fer­ence at the head­quar­ters of the rul­ing Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC), At­tor­ney Gen­er­al John Je­re­mie said the Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar ad­min­is­tra­tion in­tends to ad­vance the ZOSO leg­is­la­tion, de­signed to tar­get crime “hot spots” with­out re­sort­ing to a SoE, which he ac­knowl­edged had “yield­ed tan­gi­ble ben­e­fits”.

‘We in­tend to lock in those ad­van­tages which have yield­ed tremen­dous re­sults in terms of the drop in homi­cides, the drop in wound­ing and the drop in gen­er­al crime, gen­er­al­ly,” AG Je­re­mie told re­porters.

He added: “Our first at­tempt to do that is with the zones leg­is­la­tion.”

“The leg­is­la­tion which is be­fore the House is in­tend­ed to en­sure that there is a mea­sure of pro­por­tion­al­i­ty be­tween our re­spons­es and the threats which we now face. So that in­stead of a na­tion­al State of Emer­gency, we pro­pose to con­cen­trate on hot spots,” he added.

The AG said there would al­so be some pa­ra­me­ters un­der which the ZOSOs will func­tion.

“There is leg­isla­tive prece­dence—I think I can say that with­out go­ing in­to the bill. There is leg­isla­tive prece­dence for what we pro­pose to do. There are checks and con­trols. There will be ju­di­cial over­sight. There will be some time con­straint with re­spect to how long the des­ig­na­tion of a par­tic­u­lar zone of op­er­a­tion, how long that des­ig­na­tion can last and there will be pro­ce­dures set in the bill to gov­ern who ex­act­ly can de­clare some­where zone of op­er­a­tion,” AG Je­re­mie said.

“We just ask you to re­mem­ber that these are mat­ters which are be­fore the Par­lia­ment,” he said.

Trinidad and To­ba­go record­ed 369 mur­ders last year—a 42 per cent de­cline in mur­ders as com­pared to the pre­vi­ous year when 626 peo­ple were killed—the low­est mur­der fig­ures for Trinidad and To­ba­go since 2014.

The Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) had said, in a state­ment ear­li­er this month, that se­ri­ous crimes al­so had de­clined by eight per cent; vi­o­lent crimes dropped by 15 per cent; lar­ce­ny of mo­tor ve­hi­cles de­creased by 21 per cent; and fa­tal road traf­fic ac­ci­dents went down by 22 per cent.

The Po­lice Ser­vice said there al­so was an im­proved de­tec­tion rate, in­clud­ing an in­crease in the de­tec­tion rate for mur­ders, which went from 15 per cent to 20 per cent. For na­tion­al se­ri­ous re­port­ed crimes, the de­tec­tion rate went up from 29 per cent to 36 per cent.

In ad­di­tion, po­lice al­so seized 673 il­le­gal firearms and more than three tonnes of mar­i­jua­na in 2025.

The TTPS said, un­der SoE pow­ers, they ex­e­cut­ed 12,574 op­er­a­tions, tar­get­ing 3,723 pri­or­i­ty of­fend­ers and con­duct­ed over 82,000 search­es. —PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad (CMC)