CoP: No bias in granting protest permission

Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Al­lis­ter Gue­var­ro has ad­dressed crit­i­cism sur­round­ing the polic­ing of protests dur­ing the SOE, re­ject­ing claims that of­fi­cers have treat­ed some demon­stra­tions dif­fer­ent­ly from oth­ers.

“That is very far from the truth,” he said while speak­ing to re­porters in To­ba­go this morn­ing.

Gue­var­ro point­ed to demon­stra­tions held fol­low­ing the po­lice-in­volved shoot­ing death of Joshua Sama­roo, say­ing of­fi­cers had fa­cil­i­tat­ed sev­er­al protests be­fore in­ter­ven­ing when or­gan­is­ers breached the emer­gency reg­u­la­tions.

“I want to draw par­tic­u­lar at­ten­tion to the Joshua Sama­roo protest. That protest ac­tu­al­ly had about 15 or 16 protest demon­stra­tions in front of po­lice sta­tions pri­or, but they were all held with­in the law and they were all done in the right way.”

“Thus, when it reached to the point of it be­com­ing ad­ver­sar­i­al and against what the emer­gency pow­ers reg­u­la­tion dic­tates, that is when the po­lice had to step in and take de­ci­sive ac­tion.”

How­ev­er, the TTPS had pre­vi­ous­ly is­sued a pub­lic ad­vi­so­ry con­cern­ing protests at po­lice sta­tions. In a March 25 re­lease, the ser­vice re­mind­ed cit­i­zens that pub­lic as­sem­blies must com­ply with the law, re­main peace­ful and avoid ob­struct­ing po­lice op­er­a­tions or threat­en­ing pub­lic safe­ty.

The ad­vi­so­ry was is­sued amid a se­ries of demon­stra­tions fol­low­ing the Feb­ru­ary 1 fa­tal po­lice shoot­ing of Joshua Sama­roo and the wound­ing of his wife, Ka­ia Sealy. Dur­ing one protest out­side the of­fice of the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice on Feb­ru­ary 5, or­gan­is­ers called for Gue­var­ro’s res­ig­na­tion and greater ac­count­abil­i­ty from the TTPS.

In the March ad­vi­so­ry, the TTPS al­so said that any or­gan­ised march re­quired a per­mit from the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice un­der the Sum­ma­ry Of­fences Act and warned that gath­er­ings ob­struct­ing ac­cess to po­lice fa­cil­i­ties or dis­rupt­ing op­er­a­tions could be dis­persed.

Asked about the process for demon­stra­tions, Gue­var­ro ap­peared to take a dif­fer­ent po­si­tion.

“As it was bandied about in­to the pub­lic, you don’t re­al­ly need per­mis­sion to protest. What you do, you no­ti­fy the Of­fice of the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice.”

He added: “In some cas­es, some peo­ple have a spo­radic protest, but there are means and ways in which you protest that could be of­fen­sive to the law and that is what we are try­ing to pre­vent.”