CoP: SOE extension not my decision

Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Al­lis­ter Gue­var­ro says any de­ci­sion on whether to ex­tend the State of Emer­gency (SOE) rests with the Gov­ern­ment, as he de­fend­ed the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice’s han­dling of crime, protests and pub­lic se­cu­ri­ty con­cerns.

Speak­ing with re­porters in To­ba­go, Gue­var­ro made it clear that the TTPS does not de­ter­mine whether the emer­gency mea­sures re­main in place.

The Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil head­ed by the Prime Min­is­ter makes the fi­nal de­ci­sion on whether to ex­tend the state of emer­gency. The Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice is part of the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil.

On the re­cent rise in mul­ti­ple homi­cides, Gue­var­ro ac­knowl­edged the chal­lenge fac­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tors but said pre­dict­ing mur­ders re­mains dif­fi­cult.

“These mul­ti­ple homi­cide in­ci­dents, we are very hard pressed to fig­ure out in terms of pre­dict­ing where homi­cides come from,” he said.

“We wish that we could be om­nipresent every­where and we wish we could pre­dict the homi­cides that are go­ing to oc­cur, thus we’d be able to put as­sets and re­sources in places to pre­vent them.”

He said the po­lice con­tin­ue to re­ly on in­tel­li­gence gath­er­ing and pub­lic co­op­er­a­tion to pre­vent and solve vi­o­lent crimes.

“At this point in time, we would like to re­ly on the in­tel­li­gence that we have and ask the mem­bers of the cit­i­zen­ry to share in­for­ma­tion that they may have with us, to al­low us to solve these crimes and to bet­ter pre­dict where these oc­cur­rences will take place and thus put pre­ven­ta­tive mea­sures in place.”

Asked whether po­lice were on top of the crime sit­u­a­tion de­spite a re­cent se­ries of dou­ble and triple mur­ders, Gue­var­ro said the TTPS con­tin­ues to as­sess in­ci­dents and de­ploy re­sources where need­ed.

Crime in To­ba­go al­so re­mains a con­cern fol­low­ing the is­land’s sixth mur­der for the year.

“Every sin­gle homi­cide in Trinidad and To­ba­go is of par­tic­u­lar con­cern to the TTPS,” Gue­var­ro said.

“What I will be able to tell you is that we mon­i­tor and we eval­u­ate each in­ci­dent and we put par­tic­u­lar treat­ments in place to deal with it go­ing for­ward.”