DR HAMID GHANY

This col­umn is be­ing writ­ten be­fore the de­bate on the mo­tion of no-con­fi­dence in the Prime Min­is­ter. How­ev­er, in the pre­lude to the de­bate it­self the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment did not hide the fact that all of the crime sta­tis­tics had shown that there was a down­ward trend.

The Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sion, in con­duct­ing its as­sess­ment of Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Dwayne Gibbs felt that they could on­ly give him a "fair" grade and it took them three press re­leas­es and one ap­pear­ance be­fore a Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee of Par­lia­ment to try to get the point across.

Ob­vi­ous­ly there is some kind of dis­con­nect be­tween the Gov­ern­ment's as­sess­ment of the crime sit­u­a­tion and the as­sess­ment by the Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sion. The Gov­ern­ment hired the Com­mis­sion­er based on the new cri­te­ria for the ap­point­ment to that po­si­tion which in­volves ap­proval of the nom­i­nee for the post by the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives.

How­ev­er, nei­ther the Gov­ern­ment nor the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives does the as­sess­ment which is left to the Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sion. Dwayne Gibbs, like Stephen Williams be­fore him, was nom­i­nat­ed for the post of Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice af­ter a vet­ting process con­duct­ed by the Penn State Uni­ver­si­ty Jus­tice and Safe­ty In­sti­tute for the Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sion who sent his name to the Pres­i­dent to nom­i­nate him for the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives to ei­ther ap­prove or re­ject.

This process was in­tro­duced dur­ing the tenure of the Man­ning Ad­min­is­tra­tion. Stephen Williams, a na­tion­al of this coun­try, was re­ject­ed by the PNM ma­jor­i­ty in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives when he was nom­i­nat­ed for this job in 2008. The next time around, Dwayne Gibbs, a Cana­di­an na­tion­al, was nom­i­nat­ed for the job and he was ap­proved by the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship ma­jor­i­ty in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives.

Penn State had a hand in the eval­u­a­tion process for mak­ing a nom­i­na­tion. Do they have a role in the as­sess­ment process for on-the-job per­for­mance ? There is a great dis­con­nect here and one won­ders whether we have not done our­selves a dis­ser­vice by hav­ing such a cum­ber­some process with all of the ob­vi­ous dis­con­nects along the way.

The as­ses­sors at the Penn State Jus­tice and Safe­ty In­sti­tute may not have the same xeno­pho­bic bias that has been demon­strat­ed lo­cal­ly where­by it seems that pref­er­ence must be giv­en to na­tion­als first and there is a be­lief that cit­i­zen­ship and birth­place ought to be used as the key to the rank­ing scheme. In the ab­sence of such xeno­pho­bic bias, the as­ses­sors at Penn State gave us nom­i­nees for the con­sid­er­a­tion of the Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sion and ul­ti­mate­ly the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives.

It ap­pears that the prospect of a Cau­casian for­eign­er be­com­ing the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice in Trinidad and To­ba­go is a prob­lem for some per­sons. Af­ter fifty years of in­de­pen­dence we still have not re­solved some of these is­sues as we face a glob­al­ized world. That is yet an­oth­er dis­con­nect that we must face here.

Did the Man­ning Ad­min­is­tra­tion ex­pect the as­ses­sors at Penn State Uni­ver­si­ty to use race, birth­place and na­tion­al­i­ty as part of a hu­man re­source search for the best can­di­date for the job when they es­tab­lished this process ?

One would hard­ly imag­ine that the Man­ning Ad­min­is­tra­tion would have used its ma­jor­i­ty in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives in 2008 to vote against the nom­i­na­tion of Stephen Williams for the po­si­tion of Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice on the ba­sis of race, birth­place and na­tion­al­i­ty. The Hansard record of the pro­ceed­ings shows oth­er­wise.

As a con­se­quence of the re­jec­tion of the nom­i­na­tion of Stephen Williams by the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, the Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sion was re­quired to make a fresh nom­i­na­tion to the Pres­i­dent who then made an­oth­er nom­i­na­tion to the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives by 2010 and Dwayne Gibbs was ap­proved by the House on 2nd Ju­ly, 2010.

The prob­lem that will now face the Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sion is how to rec­on­cile the over­all sta­tis­ti­cal re­duc­tion in vi­o­lent crime in the so­ci­ety with the calls from some sec­tors for Gibbs' ap­point­ment to be ter­mi­nat­ed. At the same time, they need to make pub­lic the sci­en­tif­ic sur­vey that they said was con­duct­ed as part of their as­sess­ment of Gibbs' per­for­mance so that it does not re­main shroud­ed in se­cre­cy while be­ing talked about in the pub­lic do­main.

What is emerg­ing is all kinds of com­ments about Gibbs' at­ti­tude which sug­gest that he does not have the soft­er side in his hu­man re­la­tions skills that would meet the fan­cy of some of his as­ses­sors. It is of­ten dif­fi­cult for no-non­sense qua­si-mil­i­tary lead­ers to have the time or the in­cli­na­tion to de­vel­op the soft­er side of their per­son­al­i­ties to suit ag­gres­sive cross-ex­am­in­ers who may or may not have a pre-con­ceived bias against them. For the time be­ing, Dwayne Gibbs is on no­tice that it could just be a mat­ter time be­fore he is sent on his way back to Cana­da.

If the crime rate hap­pens to be re­duced fur­ther by the time his seem­ing­ly in­evitable de­par­ture time ar­rives, then we could all pat our­selves on the back for a good xeno­pho­bic job well done. Af­ter that, we could try for a lo­cal again.