Regional security consultant Dr Garvin Heerah is ­worried that Trinidad and Tobago’s murder total has now crossed the 200 mark. But are expectations of a lower homicide rate realistic?Last Saturday, the murder toll reached 203 with the killing of 32-year-old plumber Nyron Kyle Davis, who was watching a football match at a bar in La Romaine around 10 p.m. when two gunmen opened fire on him and another man, then ran off.The murder toll stood at 204 for the year so far up to last night with the killing of a Diego Martin man on Tuesday.In an interview published in last Tuesday’s Express, Minister of Homeland Security Roger Alexander argued that many of the homicides reported this year were from altercations/domestic incidents which the police don’t have control over. That is somewhat disingenuous. With the 42% drop in murders recorded between 2024 and 2025, accomplished largely by the shuttering of URP and CEPEP and the use of extraordinary police powers under the state of emergency (SoE) to detain gang members, it is statistically inevitable that the proportion of domestic violence and personal altercation killings would increase.Even so, why is the global murder rate five times lower than T&T’s, at 5.4 compared to 28 per 100,000? Europe and East Asia have homicide rates of less than one in 100,000, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Within the Caricom grouping (omitting Haiti and the small islands), T&T now has the region’s highest homicide rate since Jamaica reduced their total from 49 per 100,000 to 22 per last year, largely through ongoing community-level lockdowns. Domestic and altercation killings are therefore only part of a larger pattern in our society.In any case, despite Minister Alexander’s deflection, criminals killing at will remains far too common. The last time this country saw an annual murder total under 200 was 24 years ago, when 171 people were killed in 2002. The following year, the total was 229—the same year, according to Ministry of Finance budget documents, that the allocation for the URP was increased 200% from $100 million to $300 million.Thereafter, the homicide total increased steadily, reaching a then-record of 547 in 2008, and dropping below 400 only in 2011 (during the SoE) and 2012, and in 2020 (during the Covid-19 lockdown). At the present rate, T&T is looking at a murder total of 381 in 2026, if the present trend continues, compared to 369 last year.As this newspaper has noted several times before, this is clear proof that the current SoE has reached its limit in containing homicides. It also appears that law enforcement officials are bereft of ideas on how to reduce the murder rate further.In the interview published in yesterday’s Express, Dr Heerah proposed several broad strategies: sustained political support, enhanced intelligence capabilities, inter-agency cooperation, and strategic leadership. He also highlighted the need for a comprehensive intelligence review within the prison system, saying that incarcerated gang leaders continued to direct ­murders, retaliatory attacks, extortion and other serious crimes from jail.If all this can be done effectively, an annual murder total of under 200 will be a good start.