Who is popular today?

COMMUNITY responsibility, accountability, cracking down on corruption and youth education are some of the solutions Khaleem Ali has seen other countries use in their crime prevention and reduction strategies.
The 26-year-old lawyer has been working with the UN in various capacities since his early 20s, most recently on Generation Justice Youth Network, a committee made up of 50 young people worldwide. He chaired the Latin America and the Caribbean sub-committee as the only Caribbean representative present. The group created a Youth Global Blueprint for Action which will be part of the discussions at the 15th UN Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice in 2026.
The 15th Crime Congress will be held from April 25 - 30, 2026 in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Speaking to Newsday during an interview at Hyatt Regency, Port of Spain, on August 13, Ali said the government should stop being reactionary and seriously treat crime as a social issue which needs to be fixed.
“We look at crime as a problem to be fixed in isolation and don’t look at the underlying issues that exist when we talk about education, upward mobility and advancement, job opportunities, empowering and upskilling young people, giving young people the opportunity to lead, male marginalisation, and judicial and legislative issues. We need to address crime-fighting methods and how the police address crime from the report to solution.”
Ali said several countries have moved to acknowledging the problems and are working on resolving the issues. One such approach was developing a sense of individual and collective responsibility in communities.
“I went to Japan earlier this year and we talked about dialogue being the tool for crime prevention and community engagement. One of the mayors of a city in Tokyo prioritised bringing the people in a community together from different age groups, talking about the different issues, getting all the perspectives and using dialogue tools and techniques to reach a place of consensus so that you foster a sense of collective community and individual and collective responsibility.”
Ali said MPs could take similar initiatives to bring people from the community together on a regular basis, not only when there is a need for public consultation for an act of parliament or uproar over an issue.
“We need to focus on getting more community people involved, so when people see something, they say something, so when people see acts of rebellion taking place they intervene, without the state having to always be the source of intervention. It’s the government’s job to intervene, they have a mandate, but we also have individual and collective responsibility.” He said community councils and neighbourhood groups were the norm in other countries and the MPs would consult them to find out what the problems in the community were, but no effort was put into creating these in TT. He said different communities had different root causes of crimes. He said the attitude of police towards people was another issue, especially for domestic violence and sexual abuse.
Ali said corruption is a major issue which had to be addressed, including white-collar crime.
“People don’t understand that white-collar crime is pervasive here and it supports and feeds a lot of the violent crime we interact with on a regular basis. Corruption rears its ugly head in several aspects, whether in the perpetration of criminal acts, how these acts are dealt with when reported or the results that come out of the report, corruption is pervasive here.”
He said individual and collective responsibility came into play in addressing corruption.
[caption id="attachment_1172557" align="alignnone" width="697"] UN volunteer Khaleem Ali at the Hyatt Regency, Wrightson Road, Port of Spain, on August 13. - Photo by Angelo Marcelle[/caption]
“People are always saying police can’t solve crime but when there’s an article about police issuing tickets for traffic offences or roadblocks, they get frustrated and say ‘all police could do is issue tickets.’ But people don’t understand that those are offences and that is a part of crime.
“You’re willing to turn a blind eye to small acts of crime because it might be a personal inconvenience to you or you have to pay a fine or penalty, but that is the police doing their jobs and enforcing the laws against you who are breaking the law.”
He said many people were willing to turn a blind eye to crime and corruption once it benefited them. “We’ve all heard the stories of bribery, who have friends who could make things disappear or make things speed up. Until we have that conversation nationally, understanding that small acts of crime create avenues for bigger acts of crime, violence and other criminal acts to occur, we are supporting an enabling environment for crime.”
Ali said TT had a lot to learn from other countries on how they addressed corruption, including charging, prosecuting and sentencing those involved.
Use technology as a strategy
Another aspect in which TT is behind other countries is the use of technology in fighting crime.
“They are using artificial intelligence, small drones, acoustic bullets detection software. They have police vehicles that can detect and flag stolen license plates, they’re using technology to aid in crime-fighting and to foster trust and accountability in the police service.
“Government could create a QR system tied to an authentication software where you don’t have to ask a police officer to see his badge. You could just scan the QR code and it would tell you whether the person is an actual police officer, their name, their badge number, the division they’re assigned to, all the information I need to know. So police can’t come and do what they want to do or people can’t come and pretend to be a police officer, which is now also a trend in our crime.”
He said the implementation of many of these measures boils down to political will and the weeding out of corruption at every level from communities to government offices to politicians.
“Accountability is the antidote to crime in my opinion. When you hold people accountable and hold them to the standard they have to be held at and they are forced to do their jobs, things improve. But when you don’t have a system of accountability and it’s swept under the carpet or you pay a little bribe or turn a blind eye, it’s no wonder crime is where it’s at.”
Ali said crime prevention starts with young people in every level of society, not just those from hotspot areas.
“When you stigmatise people from these areas, you create an ‘us vs them’ narrative, where ‘these people different so they need this, and the rest of allyuh good, so you don’t need that.’ Every child needs to be educated about crime and have that sense of national pride to see that reporting crime, staying away from a life of crime, those are ways of being patriotic.”
He said the government has the opportunity to use the school curriculum to educate young people about crime, including changing the narrative around snitching.
“Where do you think crime starts? With how snitching is dealt with. Snitching is frowned upon because you’re telling, and somehow you telling makes you a weak person, or whatever degrading words people use for people who report. A snitch is someone who reports a violation or offence, like stealing a pencil in school, and our national culture is very much towards berating and humiliating people who snitch, making it out to be this horrible thing.
“But what are we doing to the person who breaks the law or commits the offence? We persecute the person who went and reported ‘so-and-so stole a pencil’ and so you are again creating an environment where ‘to report’ is ‘to be weak’; to address something is to be inferior, so I need to see something and turn a blind eye, and that is what we are conditioning our children to do in schools.”
Teach children to speak up
Ali said there are teachers and parents who turn children away when they report something is wrong.
“When people in positions of power and influence over children tell them those kinds of things, the children grow up and say, ‘I see it but I won’t say anything,’ and a big problem in the country is that people don’t report. They know who is involved, they know what’s going on, they know where it’s happening, they might see something but they will not say it, because it goes back to that condition is to be inferior or to be weak.”
He said government and the wider society had to work with youth and actively take measures to combat that stigma and make it a point of national pride to report infractions and violations to contribute to the public good.
“So if from a young age I can steer someone away from thinking it’s ok to do what they want and get away with it, that’s me contributing to the betterment of my country in the future, because they will grow up knowing actions have consequences, as opposed to the people who tells getting the consequences and the people doing the offence get to walk away scot-free.”
Ali said the issues surrounding crime are tied into the social fabric of TT.
“We only try to fix crime in isolation, not realising that if the fabric is compromised in other areas, no matter how much you fix that area, any little problem, the wound is going to re-open.
“None of these issues are new but what I’ve learned from other countries is that TT prioritises talk but other countries prioritise action. We’re still stuck in the ‘we will look at this’ phase, but other countries have started taking decisive action.”
 
The post UN volunteer on crime prevention in Trinidad and Tobago: Go to the heart of communities appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.