Recruitment drive, machine failure blamed for Certificate of Character backlogs

Ralph Ban­warie

The rush to se­cure Cer­tifi­cates of Good Char­ac­ter for re­cruit­ment dri­ves by the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice, the Air Guard, the Trinidad and To­ba­go De­fence Force and oth­er state agen­cies has once again ex­posed long­stand­ing pro­cess­ing prob­lems at the San­gre Grande Po­lice Sta­tion, where se­nior of­fi­cers say on­ly one ma­chine is avail­able to han­dle hun­dreds of ap­pli­ca­tions.

Of­fi­cers told Guardian Me­dia that ap­pli­cants from San­gre Grande and sur­round­ing com­mu­ni­ties are now be­ing joined by peo­ple from Ari­ma be­cause there is no ma­chine avail­able at the Ari­ma Po­lice Sta­tion.

On Tues­day, ap­pli­cants queued from the sta­tion’s charge room on­to the main road, many car­ry­ing their doc­u­ments in brown en­velopes as they wait­ed to be­gin the ap­pli­ca­tion process.

Po­lice re­as­signed ad­di­tion­al of­fi­cers to as­sist with fin­ger­print­ing and oth­er ad­min­is­tra­tive du­ties as hun­dreds of most­ly un­em­ployed young men and women turned up seek­ing the doc­u­ment.

Se­nior of­fi­cers apol­o­gised for the de­lays, say­ing the sta­tion re­quires at least three pro­cess­ing ma­chines to han­dle the vol­ume of ap­pli­ca­tions ef­fi­cient­ly. They al­so called on the rel­e­vant au­thor­i­ties to in­stall a pro­cess­ing ma­chine at the Ari­ma Po­lice Sta­tion to re­duce the back­log.

Of­fi­cers fur­ther urged em­ploy­ers to tem­porar­i­ly ac­cept the ap­pli­ca­tion re­ceipt is­sued to ap­pli­cants un­til the cer­tifi­cate is ready.

The is­sue is not new.

Guardian Me­dia re­port­ed in Ju­ly 2025 that the ma­chine used to process Cer­tifi­cates of Good Char­ac­ter at the San­gre Grande Po­lice Sta­tion had been out of ser­vice for an ex­tend­ed pe­ri­od. At the time, of­fi­cers were forced to trans­port com­plet­ed ap­pli­ca­tions to Ari­ma or Port-of-Spain for pro­cess­ing, re­sult­ing in sig­nif­i­cant de­lays.

That back­log af­fect­ed job seek­ers and taxi dri­vers, some of whom were un­able to com­plete em­ploy­ment ap­pli­ca­tions or re­new taxi badges be­cause agen­cies re­quired the orig­i­nal cer­tifi­cate rather than the ap­pli­ca­tion re­ceipt.

Po­lice had said then that the is­sue had been re­peat­ed­ly re­port­ed to the rel­e­vant au­thor­i­ties.