For­mer chair­man of the Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sion (PSC) Ken­neth Lal­la SC wants to know whether there is on­go­ing eval­u­a­tion of the per­for­mance of act­ing Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er (CoP) Stephen Williams to de­ter­mine his suit­abil­i­ty to be ap­point­ed to the top po­si­tion.

Lal­la said if Williams-who is act­ing in the po­si­tion for six months-was al­ready be­ing al­lowed to act in the post be­cause of his com­pe­tence, he should al­so be con­sid­ered fit to be ap­point­ed CoP. Fail­ing that, he asked, is the act­ing CoP be­ing sub­ject­ed to ab­stract eval­u­a­tion mech­a­nisms to de­ter­mine his suit­abil­i­ty for the ap­point­ment? "If this be so then the PSC would sim­ply be a cog in the wheel in the process and would be of no val­ue or sig­nif­i­cance," Lal­la warned.

In such cir­cum­stances, he said it is no won­der that there is mon­u­men­tal frus­tra­tion among po­lice of­fi­cers. Lal­la said the ap­point­ments of non-na­tion­als Dwayne Gibbs and Jack Ewats­ki to the two most se­nior po­si­tions in the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) was "not on­ly an af­front to the dig­ni­ty of our sov­er­eign­ty and 50 years of in­de­pen­dence but a rev­e­la­tion of the ne­glect and gross in­com­pe­tence on the part of suc­ces­sive gov­ern­ments to ob­serve and im­ple­ment the ba­sic prin­ci­ples of ca­reer man­age­ment and suc­ces­sion plan­ning which are fun­da­men­tal to good and ef­fi­cient man­age­ment and gov­er­nance."

He added: "It has been em­pir­i­cal­ly es­tab­lished that good man­age­ment re­quires a fair and prop­er per­for­mance ap­praisal sys­tem of an of­fi­cer's per­for­mance with feed­backs and an op­por­tu­ni­ty to ad­dress short­com­ings and de­fi­cien­cies in or­der to qual­i­fy for up­ward mo­bil­i­ty.

"Fur­ther, the de­ter­mi­na­tion of the per­for­mance and suit­abil­i­ty of an of­fi­cer for an ap­point­ment to a high­er of­fice should not be mea­sured and eval­u­at­ed by for­eign­ers or the opin­ions of com­mit­tees, in­ter­view­ers or pro­mo­tion boards or ap­prais­ers from out­side the Ser­vice who are strangers to an of­fi­cer's po­ten­tials and at­trib­ut­es but by those who have the im­me­di­ate su­per­vi­sion and con­trol of the of­fi­cer."

The for­mer PSC head said he was not in favour of the old sys­tem of se­lec­tion, since the po­lit­i­cal par­ty with ma­jor­i­ty con­trols the House and such ap­point­ments were clear­ly po­lit­i­cal, with the PSC "used sim­ply as an in­stru­ment for rub­ber-stamp­ing the ap­point­ments." That sys­tem, he said. mil­i­tat­ed against the in­de­pen­dence and po­lit­i­cal neu­tral­i­ty of the po­lice.

Lal­la said the sys­tem by which Gibbs and Ewats­ki were ap­point­ed, with Penn State Uni­ver­si­ty in the Unit­ed States re­tained to se­lect suit­able can­di­dates was al­so flawed be­cause that body was far re­moved from Trinidad and To­ba­go and had no knowl­edge of or ex­po­sure to the cul­ture, tra­di­tion or psy­che of the peo­ple. He said the Penn State sys­tem was "com­plex, cost­ly and con­vo­lut­ed" and the re­sults were cat­a­stroph­ic.

"We are now on the thresh­old of con­sid­er­ing the ap­point­ment of an­oth­er CoP and Deputy CoP and it is not clear whether the Pres­i­dent by or­der would fol­low the pro­ce­dure hith­er­to pre­scribed or some oth­er process for nom­i­nat­ing the of­fi­cers," Lal­la said. He rec­om­mend­ed that ap­point­ments to the of­fice of CoP and Deputy CoP be made from with­in the ranks of the TTPS by those who have im­me­di­ate su­per­vi­sion and con­trol of those of­fi­cers.