Debating the Police Service Commission

In a response published in today’s Guardian, the Police Service Commission (PSC) takes issue with last Saturday’s editorial, which was critical of its handling of the appointment of a substantive Commissioner of Police and Deputy Commissioner of Police. The commission suggests that it is not to blame insofar as its failure to make substantive appointments to these positions is concerned. 

The commission took issue with the wording that stated that the Police Service Commission “cannot continue to hide behind Legal Notice 102, which according to its chairman Prof Ramesh Deosaran, “requires the director of personnel administration to advertise for a firm.” It is surprising that the commission would think that the Guardian was proposing that Prof Deosaran and the PSC should break the law by seeking to circumvent the legal notice. That was not what was being proposed. 

Rather, the suggestion was that they were hiding behind Legal Notice 102 of 2009 because the commission was not prepared to use the very same bully pulpit that Prof Deosaran had used, upon taking his oath of office, to judge former commissioner Gibbs in April 2011 and apply the same public judgment to the impediment that stands in the way of changing the system.

http://www.guardian.co.tt/digital/new-members