If 31,000 peo­ple turned up for the 5,000 ad­ver­tised Spe­cial Re­serve Po­lice jobs, what does that say about the Gov­ern­ment's un­em­ploy­ment sta­tis­tics? For­get about that for a minute and di­gest Jack Warn­er's flip­pant re­sponse to re­turn to the Cab­i­net to in­crease the SRP re­cruit­ment from 5,000 to 10,000 in re­sponse.

Why? To what end? Is the Po­lice Ser­vice the new URP? And if the in­ten­tion is to dole out more state jobs, why not 5,000 spe­cial re­serve nurs­es for the five na­tion­al hos­pi­tals and clin­ics? Why the rush to mil­i­tarise the un­em­ployed? Is it that as SRPs serve at the Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er's plea­sure and could be fired with­out the need for pesky tri­bunals and Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sions, it cre­ates an en­vi­ron­ment for a more con­trol­lable po­lice force? To what end?

And why would we need to do an end run around the Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sion if we had no in­ten­tion of cir­cum­vent­ing the rules and reg­u­la­tions that gov­ern the Po­lice Ser­vice? It is my view that there is noth­ing ac­ci­den­tal about this de­vel­op­ment and we as a peo­ple would do well to re­sist a sit­u­a­tion where we have more "spe­cial po­lice" than reg­u­lar po­lice as that sit­u­a­tion al­lows for far more po­lit­i­cal in­ter­fer­ence in our ser­vice than the Con­sti­tu­tion wants to tol­er­ate.

We need to re­ject this and I am call­ing on all cit­i­zens to speak out be­fore we wake up to find our­selves in the lat­est ver­sion of a Caribbean ba­nana re­pub­lic, at the mer­cy of King Jack and his SRP army. Write to your MP, the Prime Min­is­ter, the Pres­i­dent and to the me­dia, call­ing on the Gov­ern­ment and the Cab­i­net to re­ject this de­vel­op­ment out of hand be­fore it be­comes a re­gret­table fait ac­com­pli.

Phillip Alexan­der

Via e-mail