Ah living right dey.

 — Joel Jacobs’ last words, spoken with his hands up, before being shot and killed by the police

It was you who shoot me.

— Ornella Greaves’ last words, spoken to an armed officer

In late June, a series of demonstrations erupted across Trinidad and Tobago in response to the police killing of three Black/Afro-Caribbean men — Joel Jacobs, Israel Clinton and Noel Diamond. The men were reportedly shot with their hands up in the air after their car was stopped by the police in the community of Morvant, a designated crime hot spot.

In addition to demanding justice for the three extrajudicial killings, protesters from the community also issued a collective response to long-standing issues of state neglect, police brutality and social denigration that people in so-called “hot spots” experience. The deaths of Joel, Israel and Noel are a direct result of the same institutionalized racism and police brutality that sparked the international movement for Black lives after numerous high-profile police killings of Black men and women in the United States. Amidst the protests in Trinidad, local residents proclaimed: “This is our George Floyd.”

Then, on June 30, two days into the mass civil unrest, Ornella Greaves, a 30-year-old pregnant mother of five, was shot and killed during a protest along Trinidad’s Beetham Highway. Greaves — who already lost her brother to police violence back in 2013 — joined the protests to speak out against the frequent police abuse in the community. Protesters created makeshift roadblocks, shutting down the traffic on two major highways. Upon arriving at the blockades, police opened fire on the crowd, critically injuring Greaves who later died in the hospital.

At present, whilst the demonstrations have dissipated, the dissidence continues with online forums still being scheduled and supporters mobilizing to pay fines and bail protesters out of jail. The growing prevalence of the #blackghettoyutelivesmatter hashtag in Trinidad, as opposed to the more common #BlackLivesMatter, explicitly drives home the point that, besides race and gender, both geography and a lack of class privilege are determining factors when it comes to police brutality in the country.

The same racial logics and liberal-capitalist values that fueled colonialism in the past, lie at the root of state violence in Trinidad today. That is, whilst Trinidad and Tobago is purportedly in its post-independence era, a closer look at the country’s racial, classed and gender-based violence reveals that the state remains actively colonial. Nevertheless, movements, activists, students and youth from the West Indies have a rich track record of rising up and asserting their political agency against colonial power and state repression.

Persistent Coloniality and Patriarchal Capitalism

The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression.

— C.L.R. James

Trinidad and Tobago is an oil-rich twin-island state in the Caribbean, widely recognized for Carnival, calypso and soca, as well as its racial, religious and ethnic diversity. It is a pluralistic and complex society that comes with a sobering history of imperial penetration, dispossession, enslavement, indentureship and erasure.

Notably, Trinidad and Tobago also carries a proud tradition of creativity, resistance and collective action. Reports of political corruption, partisan conflict and violent crime often make the newspapers, as do celebrations of culture, imagination and kin. All this said, both Trinidad’s social relations and physical landscape remain profoundly shaped by the racism of colonial worldviews and class stratifications of patriarchal capitalism.

Here, as Caribbean economist George Beckford would argue, the role of the plantation and its durable legacy across regional institutions cannot be overstated. Similarly, as Marxist-Feminist Cecilia Green and socialist revolutionary Andyaie illustrate, the devastating consequences wrought by neoliberal logics and the privatization of social reproduction upon postcolonial societies must be factored into any examination of state violence. This is not only because of the repercussions austerity carries for people who are laboring in informal economies — but also because of the harm it causes to women, and the hot spots and ghettos it creates.

The government of Trinidad and Tobago, along with its institutions, remain structured along the lines of the British Empire-imposed Westminster model. It has a fraught history and regrettable track record of corruption and failure to protect and assist the people it purportedly serves. That is, abandonment and explicit violence persist, whether it be against women, children, migrants, refugees, the LGBTQI community, Indigenous people or university students. These iterations of state negligence and structural oppression look chillingly familiar, mirroring the practices of colonial governance and plantation culture.

A Geography of Hot Spots and Ghettos

Hot spots in Trinidad are neighborhoods or wards with high concentrations of low-income families, informal housing, illicit economic activity and gang violence. In turn, they are regularly and problematically stereotyped as being “pest-ridden,” “parasite-infested” ghettos overrun by “marauding thugs.” Households in hot spots are disproportionately Afro-Caribbean/Black, cash-poor and under-served. They often lack access to basic services like running water and serviceable roads.

People from the ghettos are often stigmatized and discriminated against. Hot spots are also branded as “disreputable” and “threatening” spaces by both political and civil society, and as a consequence, are militarized and heavily surveilled by the state. The disparaging discourse surrounding hot spots elides the fact that the ghetto is home to a diverse array of unique Caribbean thinkers and cultural producers. Even so, the negative connotations remain.

In diagnosing social relations across the Caribbean, West Indian journalist Sunity Maharaj and novelist George Lamming suggest that while European imperialists no longer hold the reins of power, historical amnesia and the old colonial order endures. Caribbean political economist Lloyd Best and author V.S. Naipaul go so far as to describe the Trinidad’s post-independent class dynamics and racial tensions as competing classes of “Afro- and Indo-Saxon” elites pitted against not only each other, but also against “ghetto yutes.”

Both Trinidadian poet Colin Robinson and activist Stephanie Leitch assert the Westminster-modelled state remains doggedly heteropatriarchal. Many argue that whilst the country won its political independence, the racial hierarchies, economic disparity, oppressive gender regimes and socio-spatial segregation that characterized the colonial plantation carries on to this day. Indeed, to understand Trinidad, as well as the inherent violence of the state, it is important to take geography into account.

Slaying Like A Capitalist State: “One Shot, One Kill”

In the wake of the recent killings and subsequent protests, police commissioner Gary Griffith, a former military captain who “serves God” and notoriously implemented and adamantly defended a “one shot, one kill” use-of-force policy, stated that demonstrators deserved the full brunt of law enforcement. Per Griffith’s approach, the police fired live rounds, used chemical irritants, beat protesters and arrested 72 community members who participated in the collective action. The protesters were charged under the Public Health Ordinance Act, which was updated in light of the coronavirus pandemic and provided officers an excuse to detain protesters who did not adhere to social distancing regulations.

According to organizers, the arrested demonstrators were confined to overcrowded cells — in clear violation of the Public Health Ordinance Act — where they suffered physical abuse at the hands of the police. Local activists, in response, contended that the state was weaponizing COVID-19 against the public.

The current militarization of the police force follows a long history of state violence. The Trinidadian police carries a jarring and exceptionally brutal legacy of caging, maiming and executing Indigenous, African and Indian peoples, amongst others. For over 400 years, the mandate of the police force has been to suppress the uprisings of the disenfranchised, displaced and subjugated in the name of “law and order,” putting the interest of capital over the well-being of the public.

Here, one need not look any further than the exploitation of local workers and ecosystems facilitated by free trade deals, fossil fuel dependency and Structural Adjustment Programs to understand the social and ecological damage caused by the increasing neoliberalization of economies and societies across the Caribbean.

On this front, and related to the Trinidadian police force’s “war on crime,” gangs and the drug trade, Caribbean scholarship explains that the surges in organized gang activities stemmed from structural adjustment policies that were being implemented in the 1980s. Upon the state slashing social spending and its public sector budget in order to service sovereign debt, liberalize its economy and cope with plummeting oil prices, countless people across the region were left on their own.

In turn, many opted for livelihood strategies in informal, illicit and illegal economies. Moreover, other regional researchers have noted that market shocks intrinsic to global capitalism resulted in stagnating domestic economies, which opened the door to the drug trade. Hence, there is an argument to be made that if the Trinidadian police force was honestly concerned with eliminating gangs and narco-trafficking, they should be taking aim at neoliberal policies and the capitalist state.