It should be interesting to see what would happen next with this police sickout. Suddenly, 40 per cent is too much. Do police officers buy ginger? The reason I pick ginger is that it is a basic ingredient of many dishes, a medical root, a settler of stomachache and I could go on and on. Two years ago, the week before Christmas, ginger was $24 a pound. Other seasonal food needs were in a similar price range.
A couple of weeks later, ginger had dropped back to $8 a pound, but other foods were off the chart.
Can all police officers walk to work at their station if they could not afford the exorbitant price of gas? When my brother quit the force some time ago, he had grown tired of travelling from Arima where he lived to the West End station in Diego Martin. Do other public officials travel that far? Do they live under the conditions that prevail in the dorms at the stations?
When the Police Service is perceived as lacking, always in the eyes of some people, they are lambasted daily in the media, by people who have never walked in their shoes. We expect exemplary service from the core groups in the Public Service-police officers, soldiers, firemen and teachers, but we pay them all like peons, as if they are one step above the slavery that ended in 1838, and the one shilling a day indentureship that followed that.
We expect them to live a middle class lifestyle on a peon's salary. Policemen are not expected to rent out all but two rooms in their house, in order to make ends meet. They are not "allowed" to run "PH taxis" while being a police officer, but some do. They are not supposed to rent out police guns, "hide" coke or other drug money, or accept bribes to lose documents pertaining to a case, but some do. Why? Money on the side, part of the sea of riches flowing through T&T.
One may ask whether these are crooked people who use the service for their own ends, or honest people trying to serve the country well but cannot do it on a pittance of a paycheck. More than 20 years ago, I noticed a number of mansion-like houses going up in Rio Claro, and I asked a resident who owned them and where they worked. Well most of the houses, according to my source, were owned by marijuana growers in the Ecclesville Forest, and a couple of them were owned by policemen paid not to find them, or to tip off the growers when a raid was planned.
If you pay an officer $50,000 a year, and a marijuana grower can pay him $25,000 for info on a raid, that officer will make in a year twice the salary of the one who is totally honest. And all for giving out a simple set of info. I said then, and I say now, that if our service people are paid well, they will not get into risky business to make ends meet. A sickout is not an act of treason, it is a plea to have their grievances listened to, and addressed. Failure to do so would only make matters worse. The peons at the bottom of the anthill need a living wage. As if to add insult to injury, the UN has announced that world food prices went up this year by 27 per cent. The country needs to take a serious look at what police officers do for the wage they get.
Linda Edwards
Via e-mail