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Gary Griffith – File photo
NATIONAL Transformation Alliance (NTA) leader Gary Griffith is calling on the Prime Minister to put their political differences aside and allow him to help the government combat the spiralling crime.
“As a former commissioner of police and a former minister of national security, I am willing yet again, to let you know that I am willing to help, because our country desperately needs it,” Griffith said in an NTA video statement on June 5.
Griffith served as CoP from August 2018-September 2020 and national security minister from September 2013-February 2015.
“To Keith Rowley: there will be doubters, there will be haters, there will be those in an unholy alliance with criminals and there will be those whispering lies and misinformation into your ears, as they have done before.”
He asked Rowley to “dismiss all and think for yourself,” adding that they need not be friends but work together as patriots.
“This is about saving lives (and) protecting scared and traumatised citizens throughout the country. This is not (the time for) ego.”
Griffith said the purpose is to “send a strong message to signal to the law-abiding citizens and the criminal elements that we intend to take back our country, as we have a nation to defend.
“We need to act now. I am willing to show you the strategies and systems that made our country feel safer on two occasions in the last decade.”
Griffith prefaced his invitation to Rowley by criticising National Security Minister Fitzgerald Hinds’s response to the shootings in Belmont and at the Port of Spain General Hospital on June 2.
Among the victims was a 21-year-old man, who Griffith said went to school with his son.
The victim and another man, Griffith said, witnessed a shooting in Belmont moments before and took the injured man to the hospital. The men were said to have been followed by the same shooters, who reportedly shot and killed the intended target and those who tried to help him.
“This brave young man, who had his entire life ahead of him, is now gone. His father, a soldier who served alongside me for 15-odd years, is left to mourn his irreplaceable loss,” Griffith said, offering his condolences.
He said Hinds called a lengthy press conference “not to give one policy, not one anti-crime plan, not one comment as to how he intends to prevent this from happening again in the future.”
He said Hinds continues to focus on legal firearms and the Stanley John Report (into issuing firearm users’ licences), which he described as “littered with lies,” rather than the “illegal firearms that account for almost 100 per cent of crimes committed with the use of a firearm.
“Why does this happen?…Because (Hinds) has no knowledge, expertise (or) clue of what to do to solve the problem.”
The government and Cabinet, he said, are full of lawyers who are heavily focused on legislation and stop-gap measures, rather than working alongside experts.
