Police: 19 serious crimes recorded for Carnival

The T&T Po­lice Ser­vice yes­ter­day con­firmed that Car­ni­val 2026 record­ed the low­est num­ber of se­ri­ous crimes in the past six years.

Dur­ing their post-Car­ni­val me­dia brief­ing at the TTPS Ad­min­is­tra­tion Build­ing in Port-of-Spain, the po­lice said there were 19 re­port­ed se­ri­ous crimes for Car­ni­val, com­pared to 62 last year.

Car­ni­val Gold Com­man­der, DCP Suzette Mar­tin, said 25 peo­ple were ar­rest­ed and one firearm with five rounds of am­mu­ni­tion was re­cov­ered.

She said there were 908 pa­trols con­duct­ed, 135 co­or­di­nat­ed op­er­a­tions and tar­get­ed ex­er­cis­es, with 241 fixed penal­ty no­tices is­sued for se­ri­ous road traf­fic ac­ci­dents, in­clud­ing two road fa­tal­i­ties, while 25.38 grammes of nar­cotics were seized.

One mur­der and three shoot­ings were record­ed in down­town Port-of-Spain dur­ing Car­ni­val Mon­day fes­tiv­i­ties.

A woman was al­so sex­u­al­ly as­sault­ed in a mas band in Wood­brook, while a 26-year-old woman was sex­u­al­ly as­sault­ed af­ter at­tend­ing a fete in Ch­aguara­mas on Car­ni­val Sun­day.

Mar­tin said the po­lice would sup­ply the con­firmed fig­ures at a lat­er date.

Asked what con­tributed to the mas­sive re­duc­tion, ACP Garvin Hen­ry said, “I’d be tempt­ed to say that it’s fan­tas­tic po­lice work, which I un­doubt­ed­ly be­lieve that it is, but I am not a sta­tis­ti­cian or crim­i­nol­o­gist but there may be oth­er fac­tors right, and this is still be­ing as­sessed and analysed by our Crime and Prob­lem Analy­sis (CA­PA) de­part­ment, right.

“To ven­ture in­to guess­ing, I do not want to mis­lead the pub­lic but rest as­sured that dili­gent po­lice work and lead­er­ship by the gold com­man­der and the com­mis­sion­er is an im­por­tant part of us re­al­is­ing these fig­ures.”

BOX

YEAR*SE­RI­OUS OF­FENCES RECORD­ED

2020: 60

2021: 74

2022: 79

2023: 56

2024: 53 Po­lice look on af­ter they de­tained a man dur­ing J’Ou­vert cel­e­bra­tions at the East­ern Main Road, Tu­na­puna on Mon­day.