Broken Windows of Trinidad and Tobago

The comments of my Uncle Bob on the photo at left (which you can access here) got me thinking about this in the context of 'The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference'. I'd been familiar with the concepts of Broken Windows beforehand; in an odd way my father drilled it into me. One little thing can destroy or help a greater thing. It's intuitive for me in a practical sense, but the book gave me a bit more to work with in a theoretical sense.

Crime remains a problem in Trinidad and Tobago - not in the sense that Michelle Malkin would have you think - but in a different sense. Richard Jobity once summed it up as a lack of hope, which has bugged me since he said it - not because of it being wrong, because it's not. It's because it's right on more levels than I had considered before. Maybe it's more right than Richard knows, I don't know.

So the picture at the top - the darkness. I labeled it Gotham, and it's taken on Harris Street in San Fernando. Literally a stone's throw away from the court. And the police station.

Here's a question: If you are going to park your car on a street, are you more likely to park it in the dark or in a lit area? If you have nothing to hide and are concerned about your car, you'll park under the light. If you have something to hide, you'll probably avoid the light.

Light - less crime. Darkness - more crime. Common sense, no? Darkness covers all forms of mischief. It covers my writing, most of the time. :0)

So one thing that Trinidad and Tobago could do is to fix all the street lights that come on sometimes. Or replace the bulbs in the dull lights - as the one in the picture, and the ones near the house here, and in... the majority of places in Trinidad and Tobago. Show me a well lit place, and I can probably show you a place with less crime. Unless it's a bank, of course. They rob in plain sight. So do politicians. :-)

Who's in charge of the street lights? I don't know specifically who is, but I know it isn't the Police, or the Minister of National Security. I expect that within a city, it's the city level or borough level government, but it's likely it's related to T&TEC.

I would expect changing light bulbs would be cheaper. In fact, I know for a face that the last government (The UNC was approached with solar lighting - my father and I did that. Plenty of talk. Maybe if we had arranged a kickback we would have more light around here, but... that's just not our way. If someone called me tomorrow and asked me if The Solar Company could do it, well, the same deal would apply. Still - electricity is cheap in Trinidad. The solar lights are a long term investment - for a quick solution, expansion of the present infrastructure probably makes as much sense, though in the end maintenance costs will be like diapers.

So that's the first window. The next window would probably be the garbage, and enforcing minor laws. But if it's so dark outside that the police are afraid to leave their stations, and the garbage collectors do not want to be out in the dark.

Let there be light... right? But instead, the government is spending millions of dollars on gadgets from Israel which aren't doing anything.

Turn on the lights. And the side benefits might even include cleaner streets.