Charles Kong Soo

Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Dwayne Gibbs says the state of emer­gency will con­tin­ue and will be eval­u­at­ed un­til its orig­i­nal pur­pose was achieved un­til "the time it comes down."Speak­ing to re­porters dur­ing the break at the In­ter­na­tion­al Con­fer­ence on Gangs, Vi­o­lence and Gov­er­nance at the Learn­ing Con­fer­ence Cen­tre, at the St Au­gus­tine Cam­pus of Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies yes­ter­day, Gibbs said:"The emer­gency will be eval­u­at­ed and is be­ing eval­u­at­ed on a dai­ly ba­sis for its use­ful­ness and to achieve what its orig­i­nal pur­pose was."

He said the emer­gency would con­tin­ue un­til De­cem­ber 5 and whether it would con­tin­ue be­yond that, or whether it would be short­ened, would be based on the in­tel­li­gence and in­for­ma­tion from law en­force­ment dis­cus­sions. When asked if he was sat­is­fied with the re­sults of emer­gency and gang-re­lat­ed ac­tiv­i­ty, he replied:"We have had very good suc­cess in terms of the num­bers of peo­ple that have been ar­rest­ed and crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty has very much de­creased.

"We know that with our work out there right now, we have cre­at­ed some op­por­tu­ni­ties for com­mu­ni­ties to ba­si­cal­ly step back and re­group in a pos­i­tive sense and we have had the op­por­tu­ni­ty for the dis­rup­tion of some of the gangs out there. All of that is pos­i­tive."Gibbs said the law en­force­ment forces were build­ing tac­ti­cal plans to go for­ward so that when the emer­gency end­ed cit­i­zens would not see a resur­gence in ma­jor crimes.

He said he was not con­cerned about the num­ber of peo­ple re­leased for gang-re­lat­ed mat­ters.He said there were a lot of ar­rests for "sub­stan­tial crimes," gang-re­lat­ed ac­tiv­i­ties, drug traf­fick­ing and gun pos­ses­sion."We have had op­por­tu­ni­ty to ac­tu­al­ly pick up peo­ple that we have been look­ing for, for crimes that have hap­pened in the past, such as homi­cides," Gibbs said.In terms of the per­sons re­leased un­der the an­ti-gang leg­is­la­tion he said that was on­ly a "small pro­por­tion" of the over­all num­ber of peo­ple that were ar­rest­ed for a va­ri­ety of gang and vi­o­lence-re­lat­ed of­fences.