Geisha Kow­lessar

T&T will wit­ness "mas­sive and rad­i­cal changes" as Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Gary Grif­fith im­ple­ments sev­er­al new poli­cies to re­duce crime, in­crease pub­lic con­fi­dence in the Po­lice Ser­vice, mod­ernise da­ta col­lec­tion sys­tems and boot out rogue po­lice of­fi­cers.Grif­fith al­so hint­ed at rec­om­mend­ing that some of the coun­try's "ar­cha­ic laws" be changed.

"This year is go­ing to be a very im­por­tant year...I in­tend to trans­form the whole na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty struc­ture, re­duce the fear of crime and fire all those rogue po­lice of­fi­cers," he said in a tele­phone in­ter­view from New York.

Grif­fith trav­elled to New York for a meet­ing to dis­cuss strate­gies to deal with T&T's crime and na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty is­sues with John Hu­vane, the chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of the Giu­liani Se­cu­ri­ty & Safe­ty, which is owned by for­mer New York may­or Rudolph "Rudy" Giu­liani. He said the meet­ing, which last­ed "a few hours well," took place on Old Year's Day and he was due home yes­ter­day.

Grif­fith said plans dis­cussed al­so in­clud­ed part­ner­ing with the New York Po­lice De­part­ment for train­ing pro­grammes for T&T's of­fi­cers, up­grad­ing the coun­try's Crime Scene Unit, de­vel­op­ing a state-of-the art DNA sys­tem and a more ef­fi­cient com­put­erised sys­tem through­out the Po­lice Ser­vice. An­oth­er key area dis­cussed, he said, was ac­count­abil­i­ty and per­for­mance in the Po­lice Ser­vice.

Say­ing he had been "bom­bard­ed" by calls from con­cerned cit­i­zens about the con­duct of some po­lice of­fi­cers, Grif­fith said this ranged from the abra­sive man­ner in which they spoke to mem­bers of the pub­lic to a lack­adaisi­cal at­ti­tude when tak­ing a re­port."There have been re­ports where of­fi­cers have re­fused to give their iden­ti­fi­ca­tion num­bers, of of­fi­cers abus­ing peo­ple in road­blocks...this must be stopped and I in­tend to take very firm ac­tion on this," he said.

"I don't think any­body should get up­set with what I am say­ing...I am not here to stroke any­body's ego."In giv­ing a re­cent ex­am­ple of un­to­ward po­lice be­hav­iour, the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter said he was told of an in­ci­dent where a woman was chopped by her hus­band and went to a po­lice sta­tion to make a re­port. But days passed and noth­ing was done by the po­lice.

"The at­tack­er even­tu­al­ly went to the sta­tion to turn him­self in...The of­fi­cer at the front told the man he was not the one who took the ini­tial re­port, so he (the at­tack­er) had to come back to the sta­tion," Grif­fith said."That of­fi­cer should have been dis­missed one time or sus­pend­ed for months."He in­sist­ed, how­ev­er, that the ma­jor­i­ty of of­fi­cers were "out­stand­ing and went above and be­yond the call of du­ty."

"But there are some rogue el­e­ments who con­tin­ue to give the pro­fes­sion a bad name and they must be dealt with," he warned.At the end of 2013, there were 407 mur­ders, com­pared to 380 last year. Ac­knowl­edg­ing there has been an in­crease in this cat­e­go­ry of crime, Grif­fith said part of the prob­lem was "turn­ing a blind eye and award­ing gang lead­ers con­tracts."He said un­der his watch this would be elim­i­nat­ed. But he ad­mit­ted there could be ex­pect­ed reper­cus­sions.

"If and when all these con­tracts are tak­en away, what we would have is the pothounds fight­ing for the scraps," he said."There is just a small ma­jor­i­ty of crim­i­nals of this coun­try's pop­u­la­tions who are ter­ror­is­ing cit­i­zens and there are about 5,000 to 10,000 crim­i­nals."Say­ing he had no in­ten­tion to "play pol­i­tics" with fight­ing crime, Grif­fith added: "I am do­ing what is right. What I am do­ing is lay­ing a foun­da­tion so that who­ev­er comes af­ter me would have a very stur­dy base."