House debates ZOSO bill today

Gail Alexan­der

Se­nior Po­lit­i­cal Re­porter

With the State of Emer­gency (SoE) ex­pect­ed to come to an end in the com­ing weeks, the Gov­ern­ment is turn­ing its at­ten­tion to tar­get­ed crime-fight­ing mea­sures in hotspots. At­tor­ney Gen­er­al John Je­re­mie re­vealed on Wednes­day that Zones of Spe­cial Op­er­a­tions (ZOSO) will be in­tro­duced, pro­vid­ing law en­force­ment with ex­pand­ed le­gal au­thor­i­ty to ad­dress crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty in hotspot com­mu­ni­ties, sim­i­lar to a mod­el used in Ja­maica.

At to­day’s House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives sit­ting will be a de­bate on The Law Re­form (Zones of Spe­cial Op­er­a­tions) (Spe­cial Se­cu­ri­ty and Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment Mea­sures) Bill, 2026, which im­ple­ments mea­sures that will fol­low the SoE, which ends Jan­u­ary 31.

The 28-clause bill, geared to en­hance T&T’s se­cu­ri­ty and curb crime, pro­vides for the Prime Min­is­ter to de­clare “Spe­cial Zones” in ei­ther Trinidad or To­ba­go, where “there are rea­son­able grounds to be­lieve that there is ram­pant crim­i­nal­i­ty—mur­der, gang war­fare, or high or es­ca­lat­ing lev­els of vi­o­lence—or a threat to the rule of law and pub­lic or­der.”

The bill pro­pos­es that se­cu­ri­ty forces com­pris­ing po­lice and De­fence Force of­fi­cers can oc­cu­py such zones. A Joint Com­mand will have au­thor­i­ty to de­clare cor­dons (for 24 hours) and cur­fews (up to 72 hours max­i­mum), and a Joint Force which will op­er­ate will al­so have search and seizure pow­ers.

The Joint Com­mand will sub­mit a writ­ten re­port to the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil every 30 days dur­ing the pe­ri­od a zone is in op­er­a­tion.

The bill al­so pro­vides for a So­cial Com­mit­tee com­pris­ing the MP for the con­stituen­cy in­volved and rep­re­sen­ta­tives of state agen­cies to as­sess con­di­tions with­in the zone, in­clud­ing the state of the phys­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture, health, en­vi­ron­ment, land tenure, hous­ing and set­tle­ments.

The team will iden­ti­fy threats to the sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment of zone com­mu­ni­ties and de­vel­op a plan which will in­clude ad­dress­ing is­sues re­lat­ing to health, en­vi­ron­ment, so­cial im­prove­ment, in­fra­struc­tur­al de­vel­op­ment, ed­u­ca­tion and eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment.

Mem­bers will rec­om­mend so­cial in­ter­ven­tions with­in the zone, in­clud­ing com­pul­so­ry school at­ten­dance ar­eas and lo­cal im­prove­ment and ur­ban re­new­al ini­tia­tives, and co-or­di­nate im­ple­men­ta­tion of so­cial in­ter­ven­tion pro­grammes by rel­e­vant bod­ies.

The com­mit­tee’s con­sid­er­a­tions will pay par­tic­u­lar at­ten­tion to vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple who live, work and at­tend school there, in­clud­ing chil­dren, the el­der­ly and the dis­abled.