Casan­dra Thomp­son�Forbes

A po­lice ex­er­cise across To­ba­go yes­ter­day caused ma­jor de­lays for com­muters.Po­lice were out as ear­ly as 5 am, set­ting up road­blocks on the Wind­ward Road in Rox­bor­ough, Good­wood, Stud­ley Park, Carn­bee, Whim and Scar­bor­ough.Mem­bers of the pub­lic com­plained of be­ing stuck in traf­fic for more than three hours in some in­stances and the grid­lock forced some busi­ness­es to re­main closed.

The T&T Guardian un­der­stands that the First Cit­i­zens branch in Rox­bor­ough and Re­pub­lic Bank's Auchenskeoch branch failed to open for busi­ness be­cause their staff was said to be stuck in traf­fic.Many schools on the is­land, in­clud­ing Rox­bor­ough Sec­ondary, Good­wood High, Scar­bor­ough Sec­ondary, Sig­nal Hill Sec­ondary and the Scar­bor­ough RC School, al­so had to dis­miss class­es due to the low turn out of teach­ers, while nu­mer­ous mat­ters in the Scar­bor­ough Mag­is­trates' Court had to be post­poned.

In an in­ter­view, ACP To­ba­go Garfield Moore de­nied po­lice were par­tic­i­pat­ing in protest ac­tion."We are ex­pect­ing at the end of the day that the pub­lic will feel a lit­tle safe in terms of try­ing to erad­i­cate guns from the streets," Moore said, adding they were al­so en­sur­ing dri­vers had prop­er doc­u­men­ta­tion.Sr Supt Joanne Archie apol­o­gised for the in­con­ve­nience but said po­lice were do­ing their jobs

"The po­lice of­fi­cers are out here in keep­ing with nor­mal po­lice prac­tices. It was not all of a sud­den, it was co-or­di­nat­ed and in some ar­eas of­fi­cers took their ini­tia­tive to con­duct ex­er­cis­es in their area. What I have seen since I came out here is po­lice of­fi­cers con­duct­ing them­selves ac­cord­ing to the law and in keep­ing with their du­ties," Archie stat­ed.The po­lice ex­er­cise end­ed at 11 am.