Eleven months after the event, Big Mike this week swore that, in Woodbrook, unknown Jouvert masqueraders were invading people's homes, opening fridges and helping themselves to food and drink.

This is what neighbours said as they ran into the Legends Carlos Street mas camp, pleading for help from the big-body men finishing mas costumes in there.

The "merry monarch" reigned but, in the streets, anarchy ruled.

After Carnival 2002, the big-body men had problems of their own, resulting in litigation and, lately, bitter calypso calumny against the NCBA regime of Richard Afong.

But Citizen Big Mike remembered the Jouvert state of nature in Woodbrook and elsewhere in Port of Spain, and the lawlessness that spread in the absence of limbs of the law.

As many others noticed, hardly any police were on the streets. Defenceless, people in Port of Spain were at the mercy of marauding thieves, vandals, rowdies, and raiders of refrigerators.

The body count was four murders. It could have been worse: the few officers on duty seized 60 offensive weapons, including knives, ice picks and a Chinese chopper.

Not since the evening of July 27, 1990, when police fled the streets of the capital, and looters and arsonists took over, was anything like that seen.

In the year that they reclaimed the headquarters, lost to terrorist firebombers on that July Friday, the police are shaping up to make a better showing this 'Jouvert'.

This could be the start of something new. The T&T police are taking shame, and regaining pride, enough to draw a line in the sand against the lawbreakers out there and the slackers, traitors and crooks in their ranks.

It appears to start with the men in suits - Commissioner Hilton Guy and his top officers - who, at the end of 2002, launched a long-awaited counter-offensive in the war on crime.

Assigned responsibility for the Guy Crime Plan, estimated to cost $3 million, Deputy Commissioner Trevor Paul showed up early on TV in his business suit, and voiced assurances about a "heightened police presence this year". For foreign consumption, he declared that the police wanted people coming for the Carnival to feel safe.

Days later, Jouvert bandleaders were hardly reassured as they made plans to hire more private security and mused bitterly about why the T&T Defence Force doesn't get more involved.

"The army does nothing but eat and train plenty," Chris Humphrey fumed. "Their presence needs to be felt within the bands, not just from the outside."

With the police now on the offensive, Carnival, and Jouvert especially, will remain the decisive test match of the contest between criminals and police.

Meanwhile, however, the police appear to have been gaining ground, if not yet the upper hand.

Endlessly last year, Mr Guy and his deputies talked about the societal roots of crime, as if it were only minimally a problem of theirs.

But the "roots" metaphor was always misleading, and irrelevant for police work, which is neither social engineering nor horticulture.

If the police can't help much at the root of the problem - said to be parenting, schooling, churching, cultural upbringing - they ought to be relevant when the "root" will have sprouted a stem as it were.

So the public measures their effectiveness in action to nip crime in the bud, or chop down and cart away the grown stems.

If the police can't stop murders from occurring, they should be able to find and arrest the killers so they can be prosecuted. It's in this that Mr Guy's forces are finally looking like winners rather than losers, even though murders proliferate.

For they are getting their men, it seems. The Guy plan had called for "aggressive investigations...Investigate serious crimes vigorously; expedite laying of charges."

Last week alone, the police were able to lay eight murder charges, having nabbed alleged culprits for some high-profile murders and major crimes.

*Among the cases solved and prosecutions begun: the Maloney killings in their beds of a small boy and his uncle by masked assassins; the killing of Constable Keiran Parke; murder of son of martial arts professor Don Jacob; the killing of Curepe businessman Ryon Hosein; and the killing of a pregnant housewife.

Men have been charged for the Securicor million-dollar heist; for the kidnapping of Rishi Permanand. Stashes of ammunition and guns have been found in Phoenix Park and in Cedros.

Suddenly, without any political direction or guidance, without noticeable new resources, without passage of the four Police Bills, with a no-name brand crime plan, the police appear to be getting results. They are actually catching criminals, and that, soon after crimes have occurred.

Moreover, the police have had conspicuous success in purging their own ranks of some officers suspected in kidnapping, robbery, extortion, shakedown, and ganja possession.

It's as if the police have got a new lease on life. And this has happened without inspiration or "leadership" from the politicians.

Much unlike bright ideas dreamed up one year ago by newcomer Minister Howard Chin Lee, full of trendy buzzwords and glittering cliches, the Guy crime plan seems to emphasise basic police work, energy, persistence, initiative, embracing a challenge, and some luck. No ad agency-minted "war on crime"; no Howard Chin Lee-patented `Operation Anaconda' that turned a fiasco.

Unless crime in Carnival 2003 sends a contrary message, Mr Guy's police seem to be proving a point: that they need only the tools, and to be left alone, to get the job done.