CoP concerned about PDOs issued to teens; promises more school-level intervention

Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­[email protected]

Days af­ter a Pre­ven­ta­tive De­ten­tion Or­der (PDO) was is­sued for a Guapo teenag­er for firearm of­fences and sus­pect­ed gang af­fil­i­a­tion, Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Al­lis­ter Gue­var­ro says he is par­tic­u­lar­ly con­cerned by the in­volve­ment of chil­dren in se­ri­ous crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty.

The le­gal no­tice, is­sued on Tues­day, iden­ti­fied the teen be­ing in­volved in “on­go­ing gang-re­lat­ed con­flict, re­tal­ia­to­ry firearm vi­o­lence and is as­so­ci­at­ed with in­di­vid­u­als en­gaged in or­gan­ised crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty” in Guapo, Point Fortin and La Brea. An­oth­er teenag­er, from Tu­na­puna, was placed on a PDO in March.

Speak­ing with re­porters af­ter a fo­rum at the T&T Cham­ber of Com­merce in West­moor­ings yes­ter­day, Gue­var­ro said such sit­u­a­tions war­rant­ed more fo­cus on in­ter­ven­tion for at-risk chil­dren.

“This is one of the rea­sons I men­tioned the ad­di­tion­al re­sources to­wards ex­pand­ing cer­tain el­e­ments of polic­ing, one of them be­ing the School-Ori­ent­ed Po­lice Pro­gramme, com­ing up for this new year, we’ll be see­ing from Sep­tem­ber.”

The pro­gramme, which was in­tro­duced in Sep­tem­ber 2025, in­volved de­ploy­ing spe­cial­ly-trained po­lice of­fi­cers to sec­ondary schools iden­ti­fied as prone to school vi­o­lence.

On the top­ic of the State of Emer­gency (SoE), Gue­var­ro de­clined to speak on whether he would be mak­ing any rec­om­men­da­tions for ad­di­tion­al pro­vi­sions, such as a cur­few, to be in­tro­duced.

He not­ed that the TTPS’ an­ti-crime strat­e­gy would take time to achieve the de­sired re­sults, but was look­ing for­ward to tan­gi­ble ben­e­fits once in­tro­duced.

“Once we have all the domi­noes lined up prop­er­ly, we will be able to see that tak­ing place with­out a state of emer­gency. I don’t want to see Trinidad and To­ba­go hav­ing a state of emer­gency, but at the end of the day we want to en­sure that the coun­try is safe.”

Re­fer­ring to past mur­der sta­tis­tics in 2022 and 2024, where the coun­try broke its own records with 605 and 626 re­spec­tive­ly, Gue­var­ro said such fig­ures were crazy, but was op­ti­mistic that bet­ter would be done in se­cur­ing the coun­try.