It is something that had to be seen to be believed; even so, after scrutinising the photographs making the rounds on the interweb, the mind fashioned all manner of scenarios to explain this terrifying imagery.
Some creative computer trickery by a pathetic, bedroom-bound computer geek has wrought these shocking photographs! No, sadly it was true; a concrete brick was hurled through the windscreen of a vehicle traversing the perilous Beetham gauntlet at 7.30 in the evening. The survivor of this bizarre attack must now be a devout Christian (insert religion appropriate to one's personal context) having been delivered from what should have been a spectacular crash. Fortunately it seemed a cool hand was at the wheel of that vehicle and the driver not only saved himself but who knows who else the targeted vehicle would have somersaulted into as they are won't to do on this particular stretch of road.
I want you to properly drink in the idea of miscreants launching concrete blocks at speeding vehicles. It is tempting to imagine that the delivery system for this missile was some rudimentary catapult, fashioned from the ample supply of scrap iron at the Sanford and Son operation on the Beetham Highway verge.
Whoever was responsible can't have been aiming for any particular vehicle because I am sure whatever method of brick-throwing they are using is devoid of calculation or calibration. This essentially means that Beetham criminals are targeting motorists the way young boys stone a mango tree during the school holidays. Of course, to hear Beetham residents tell it, "Is people comin' from outside to do dey ting insida hyear!" These desperate criminals don't care what car they hit or how many people are killed in the horrific crash likely to ensue. They cannot even be assured of a decent haul as they comb the wreckage for possibly empty wallets as their quarry lies bloodied and dying in the mangled steel.
Honestly, with this as a new trend to digest, I think I prefer the one-on-one intimacy of being shot at point blank range in the face.
All of this was happening as the police were stricken with a virulent, unidentified virus which spread rapidly through the ranks and felled hundreds of officers for a period of exactly two days. Sounds like one for Dr Courtenay Bartholomew to sink his teeth into because this is definitely an epidemiological oddity.
The Police Social and Welfare Association, quite naturally, had only heard rumours of this action and played no influential role in the execution of what officials admitted themselves was a strategic success in the ongoing war with the Chief Personnel Officer, who will probably be referred to forevermore as "five pa-cent?!" They really did not want to do it see, but their hands were forced. Officers have for quite some time been scratching out an existence in this land of ever rising inflation and predatory food pricing.
Lookit, I am in favour of salary increases for police officers. Policing has to be transformed into a vocation and be removed from the domain of those who could not get ah wuk anywhere else. Salary increases, yes! By all means, but let's have some serious debate about how this ought to be done.
President of the Police Social and Welfare Association, Anand Ramesar, has spoken of the plight of officers in the area of housing. This is an argument also advanced by the PSA; it was foolish when they did it and it is still foolish. People in this country continue to confuse the fundamental right to shelter with the national expectation of house for all! We have our governance to blame for that. Even if you are insistent that this ought to be taken into consideration in the context of providing a meaningful and living wage, no administration can be expected to calculate salaries for public officers on the basis of their aspirations.
What about a car or two, is that not considered the norm in to-day's society? I did not own a vehicle until I was 30 years old and I never held the Government responsible for my transportation woes. Setting that aside, I asked Anand Ramesar in an interview recently what police officers would bring to the table, in the unlikely event that the Government should accede to their request for a 40 per cent increase across the board. He immediately began to talk about the deplorable conditions in which many police officers have to work. So in other words, he already has a fallback plan! When officers get their money and we continue to be killed by bandits, the Police Social and Welfare Association can retreat to the "poor conditions" corner.
Fixin' T&T's Kirk Waithe is a spirited defender of the police and an advocate of doubling salaries of police officers. While we agree on the need for a proper framework to ensure that taxpayers' money does yield some benefit, he has some very strange ideas about how recurrent expenditure to be incurred by such a commitment will be financed. He is of the view that improved security will foster greater economic activity and, that in itself, is an investment that will pay off. I agree that this is a desirable outcome but I don't think you need to be an economist to know that you cannot budget for an additional $250 million a year based on projected gains in the economy.
That sounds a lot like the strategy of that travel agency that got into trouble and a lot of people discovered that they had only purchased tickets to an angry refund cruise up to a locked office. A fundamental problem here is that the police and all of the la-bour unions in the country believe that the Government has the money in the Treasury and the Finance Minister is just being tight-fisted and vindictive. We have been running a deficit budget for the last three years, a fact acknowledged both by this administration and the previous government, yet for the sake of stoking the fires the former Minister in the Ministry of National Security tries to suggest that his administration had every intention of giving police officers up to 60 per cent in salary increases.
The previous government had also promised to pay Clico policyholders and I would like very much if someone in the opposition could come forward and outline exactly how a PNM Govern- ment was going to pay them the interest they are demanding. But then that is politics, a game in which the labour unions pretend to abhor, yet play into it at their convenience. Watson Duke is getting ready to put his body and the bodies of PSA members in the concrete foundation of the highway to Point, but everyone has already forgotten that the last government was going to fire every last public servant and have them try their luck at getting their jobs back. I just thought a dose of perspective here would be useful in a debate steered, for the most part, by blind emotion so far.