Gail Alexan­der

Fol­low­ing re­moval of the cur­few re­cent­ly, the state of emer­gency is now un­der con­sid­er­a­tion, Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar said yes­ter­day. Ad­dress­ing the launch of the HDC's "Colour Me Or­ange" job pro­gramme at the Hilton Trinidad and Con­fer­ence Cen­tre, St Ann's, yes­ter­day, Per­sad-Bisses­sar said T&T coun­try had made tremen­dous sac­ri­fices un­der the emer­gency and cur­few. She said the emer­gency was un­der re­view and the cur­few was gone. "And all is well in T&T," Per­sad-Bisses­sar added. The emer­gency and cur­few were in­sti­tut­ed on Au­gust 21. The emer­gency was lat­er ex­tend­ed to De­cem­ber 5.

It was ex­tend­ed on the first oc­ca­sion, via a sim­ple ma­jor­i­ty vote in Par­lia­ment, and can be ex­tend­ed for a sec­ond three-month pe­ri­od - to March 2012 - by a sim­i­lar vote. Any ex­ten­sion be­yond six months will re­quire Op­po­si­tion PNM sup­port. The cur­few was re­moved last week af­ter two months, fol­low­ing calls by the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty to have nor­mal hours for the busy Christ­mas in­to Car­ni­val sea­sons. Yes­ter­day, Per­sad-Bisses­sar said if peo­ple were hon­est with them­selves, they would ad­mit crime had dropped dras­ti­cal­ly. "Some­times hard times de­mand hard mea­sures," she added. In a bid to con­tin­ue beef­ing up polic­ing sys­tems, the is­sue of po­lice man­age­ment will be dis­cussed at the third meet­ing in T&T of the Min­is­ters Re­spon­si­ble for Pub­lic Se­cu­ri­ty in the Amer­i­c­as (MIS­PA III) to­mor­row and Fri­day.

She said US At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Er­ic Hold­er would ar­rive to­mor­row for meet­ings with Gov­ern­ment. The MIS­PA fo­rum will bring to­geth­er ex­perts in the field of pub­lic se­cu­ri­ty and will pro­vide an op­por­tu­ni­ty to ex­change ideas and ex­pe­ri­ences to­wards strength­en­ing pub­lic se­cu­ri­ty. Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter John Sandy, who al­so spoke at the HDC func­tion, said Gov­ern­ment was de­ter­mined not to be lulled in­to com­pla­cen­cy by any tem­po­rary respite in crime. He said there was much more work to be done and Gov­ern­ment was on the right track. He said T&T had ex­pe­ri­enced com­par­a­tive peace in the 12 weeks since the emer­gency start­ed. Sandy said it was a pe­ri­od for re­flec­tion when per­sons could de­cide if they want­ed to re­turn to pre-emer­gency lev­els.