Griffith: Proper policing can avert another SoE

Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­[email protected]

One day af­ter Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar said she would not hes­i­tate to de­clare an­oth­er State of Emer­gency (SoE) if se­cu­ri­ty threats re-emerge, for­mer Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith said such a de­ci­sion would be un­nec­es­sary if the po­lice and oth­er arms of law en­force­ment max­imised their ca­pa­bil­i­ties through tech­nol­o­gy.

Re­spond­ing to Guardian Me­dia’s ques­tions via What­sApp yes­ter­day, Grif­fith, who al­so served as min­is­ter of na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty un­der the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship gov­ern­ment, said Per­sad-Bisses­sar was well with­in her rights to de­clare an­oth­er SoE if she saw fit. How­ev­er, he said such a de­ci­sion would be un­nec­es­sary if prop­er polic­ing strate­gies were draft­ed and ex­e­cut­ed.

Re­fer­ring to var­i­ous crime-fight­ing ini­tia­tives rolled out dur­ing his tenure in na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty and the suc­cess­es ob­served at that time, Grif­fith said an SoE was usu­al­ly a last re­sort when oth­er ini­tia­tives had failed.

Grif­fith al­so re­spond­ed to re­cent com­ments from Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Roger Alexan­der who was re­port­ed as claim­ing that the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice was sad­dled with a mul­ti-mil­lion dol­lar debt due to fis­cal mis­man­age­ment.

The sto­ry which was pub­lished by an­oth­er dai­ly news­pa­per quot­ed Alexan­der, who claimed that a TTPS au­dit cov­er­ing 2017 to 2022 iden­ti­fied $350 mil­lion in “li­a­bil­i­ties, ques­tion­able mul­ti-mil­lion dol­lar con­tracts, un­us­able equip­ment and pay­ments made with­out con­tracts.”

Grif­fith con­tend­ed that mod­ern polic­ing, in­clud­ing the use of tech­nol­o­gy was nec­es­sary and was of­ten cost­ly.

“Tech­nol­o­gy comes at a cost, but he (Min­is­ter of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty) seems to be to­tal­ly caught up in the 20th cen­tu­ry polic­ing of build­ing po­lice posts and call­ing State of Emer­gen­cies.

“With­in the last year we have not seen a new unit, sys­tem, pro­gramme, pol­i­cy or tech­nol­o­gy oth­er than set­ting up po­lice posts.”

In a sub­se­quent post, Grif­fith al­so re­spond­ed to the re­port which quot­ed the au­dit as rais­ing con­cern over what was de­scribed as a “Uni­fied Hock­ey Field scan­dal,” pur­port­ing that $766,924.20 were paid for ar­ti­fi­cial turf and shock pads, with $356,375 for sprin­kler sys­tems and safe­ty nets.

Grif­fith said such an un­der­tak­ing was nec­es­sary as a means of crime-pre­ven­tion by fos­ter­ing a sense of uni­ty and cam­radarie among young, im­pres­sion­able peo­ple through sport.