Gonzales calls on Alexander to release additional info on police killing

KAY-MARIE FLETCH­ER

Se­nior Re­porter

kay-marie.fletch­[email protected]

For­mer na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty min­is­ter Mar­vin Gon­za­les is call­ing on Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Roger Alexan­der to be trans­par­ent with the pub­lic and re­veal any ad­di­tion­al ev­i­dence in the po­lice chase and killing of Joshua Sama­roo if it ex­ists.

Re­spond­ing to Min­is­ter Alexan­der’s sug­ges­tion on Wednes­day that there may be ad­di­tion­al in­for­ma­tion the pub­lic isn’t privy to, Gon­za­les said noth­ing is stop­ping the min­is­ter from re­veal­ing the ev­i­dence, nor does he think it will af­fect the po­lice in­ves­ti­ga­tion.

Speak­ing dur­ing a Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment me­dia brief­ing at the Of­fice of the Op­po­si­tion in Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day, Gon­za­les said, “If you have in­for­ma­tion that paints a dif­fer­ent pic­ture, then show it. It will not un­der­mine the ev­i­dence. It will not un­der­mine the ad­min­is­tra­tion of jus­tice. It will not un­der­mine the in­tegri­ty of the in­ves­ti­ga­tion. You are play­ing smart with fool­ish­ness and you need to stop it.”

How­ev­er, he added, “Be­cause as long as they refuse to do so, they are un­der­min­ing the trust and the con­fi­dence that the peo­ple should have in the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice.”

Dur­ing a Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress me­dia brief­ing on Wednes­day, Alexan­der de­fend­ed po­lice of­fi­cers, say­ing they must be al­lowed to car­ry out their du­ties law­ful­ly, adding that that so­cial me­dia clips of­ten fail to re­flect the full se­quence of events.

“The po­lice is op­er­at­ing in a pro­fes­sion­al man­ner. But you know what the so­cial me­dia does? They take out all the front piece where the man was re­sist­ing first and then show the part where the po­lice try­ing to ex­e­cute on him. Again, we have to be care­ful.”

When asked if he was re­fer­ring specif­i­cal­ly to the Sama­roo case fol­low­ing the me­dia con­fer­ence, how­ev­er, Alexan­der said, “No, I was not.”

Asked if he had any in­for­ma­tion that there is ev­i­dence be­ing hid­den from the pub­lic, Gon­za­les ad­mit­ted to hav­ing re­ceived ad­di­tion­al in­for­ma­tion but said he isn’t ready to re­lease it yet.

On the call for top cop Al­lis­ter Gue­var­ro to re­sign over his han­dling of the of­fi­cers in­volved in the in­ci­dent, Gon­za­les isn’t con­vinced that will solve any­thing.

Gon­za­les said, “I un­der­stand that there are a lot of emo­tions in­volved and peo­ple are emo­tion­al­ly charged in this mat­ter and the calls for res­ig­na­tion is not go­ing to get to the mat­ter of this. I think the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice should be care­ful of the ad­vice he’s get­ting from the Min­is­ter of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty. He is the last per­son you should be tak­ing ad­vice from be­cause he needs ad­vice for him­self.”