Alexander on SoE extension: Additional resources expected for crime-fight

Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­[email protected]

With­out di­vulging fur­ther de­tails, Min­is­ter of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Roger Alexan­der says that ad­di­tion­al re­sources were ex­pect­ed to tack­le crime in T&T, as he says that sev­er­al se­cu­ri­ty agen­cies con­tin­ue to op­er­ate with in­suf­fi­cient staffing and equip­ment to ful­fil their du­ties.

Re­spond­ing to ques­tions about the ex­ten­sion of the on­go­ing State of Emer­gency (SoE) dur­ing the launch of a hair­styling course at his con­stituen­cy of­fice on El Do­ra­do Road on Sat­ur­day, Alexan­der said there was a need to ad­dress cer­tain de­fi­cien­cies in the State's an­ti-crime re­sponse.

He lament­ed that many chal­lenges were dif­fi­cult to over­come in or­der for the Gov­ern­ment to achieve its crime-fight­ing vi­sion.

"When those re­sources come you will see a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent kind of en­force­ment as you com­pare it to the past times.

"The prob­lem is... when you came here you came and think you can get off the ground in­stant­ly, but if the agen­cies re­spon­si­ble for crime were sti­fled and left to fend for them­selves, the first thing you have to do is to staff, re­source and mo­ti­vate.

"So it's not that we're not treat­ing with crime... I'm not sat­is­fied just yet be­cause there are still things hap­pen­ing."

Ear­li­er this month, De­fence Min­is­ter Wayne Sturge ap­peared at the Amer­i­c­as Counter-Car­tel Con­fer­ence in Flori­da, where he told US Sec­re­tary of War Pe­te Hegseth that T&T while com­mit­ted to the fight against nar­co-traf­fick­ing, lacked the re­sources to tack­le the is­sue.

"We re­quire as­sets in the in­ter­im that would en­hance our mar­itime do­main aware­ness as well as en­able us to car­ry out tar­get­ed re­in­force­ment that would serve both our in­ter­ests and would de­liv­er im­me­di­ate hemi­spher­ic ben­e­fits.

"Our Gov­ern­ment is ded­i­cat­ed and ready to shoul­der all re­spon­si­bil­i­ty, and once pro­por­tion­al­ly equipped to the ex­pec­ta­tions faced up­on us, we will de­liv­er re­sults,” Sturge told the sum­mit.

When asked if these ad­di­tion­al re­sources were re­lat­ed to Sturge's re­quest at the con­fer­ence, Alexan­der said Sturge was re­spon­si­ble for the coun­try's de­fence while he over­saw T&T's do­mes­tic se­cu­ri­ty af­fairs.

He how­ev­er ac­knowl­edged that for­eign agen­cies would be in­volved.

"We took a stand as a gov­ern­ment from the Prime Min­is­ter to sup­port a sit­u­a­tion,we e saw the ben­e­fit of the sit­u­a­tion and we con­tin­ue to see it to­day.

"We need the help."

Com­ment­ing on the ex­ten­sion of the SoE, Alexan­der said he felt that Fri­day's de­bate in the Low­er House was a "missed op­por­tu­ni­ty" for the Op­po­si­tion to re­con­sid­er the mer­its of the Gov­ern­ment's pro­posed Zones of Spe­cial Op­er­a­tions (ZOSO) leg­is­la­tion.

He not­ed that the Gov­ern­ment's in­ten­tion was to not on­ly in­tro­duce the ZOSO strat­e­gy as a crime-fight­ing method, but to in­tro­duce im­por­tant com­mu­ni­ty de­vel­op­ment ini­tia­tives and pub­lic util­i­ties projects to raise the qual­i­ty of life in these ar­eas.

Alexan­der ar­gued that he felt many of the peo­ple in Op­po­si­tion con­stituen­cies would have been gen­er­al­ly sup­port­ive of such a pol­i­cy and ques­tioned if Op­po­si­tion MPs would still be op­posed to the ini­tia­tive if they lived in the same neigh­bour­hoods as their con­stituents.