Ef­forts to cre­ate a more co­he­sive net­work among lo­cal arms of the pro­tec­tive ser­vice were among sev­er­al is­sues dis­cussed in a meet­ing be­tween Min­is­ter of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Roger Alexan­der and US-based se­cu­ri­ty firm Guide­post So­lu­tions yes­ter­day.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia af­ter the meet­ing at his of­fice on Tem­ple Court, Aber­crom­by Street, Port-of-Spain, Alexan­der said his min­istry was al­ways seek­ing to gain an ad­van­tage in how to ap­proach pub­lic safe­ty, while en­hanc­ing the re­sponse of the State’s agen­cies.

“These gen­tle­men of­fer a whole list of tech­ni­cal as­sis­tance to the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice, our Im­mi­gra­tion Ser­vice, the Prison Ser­vice and our Fire Ser­vice.

“They’ve out­lined a list of ac­tiv­i­ties we can in­cor­po­rate to in­ter­con­nect our ser­vices be­cause we are look­ing to go dig­i­tal.

“They would have brought some ideas to us and we hope in the not-too-dis­tant fu­ture to speak again so we can have peo­ple com­ing and go­ing so, we can im­prove the qual­i­ty of ser­vice com­ing to the peo­ple of T&T.”

When asked if he reached out to Guide­post So­lu­tions or whether they of­fered ad­vice, Alexan­der said, “I’m a man of many wish­es, peo­ple may see your work and say they want to speak with you and I don’t turn away peo­ple.”

The pres­i­dent of Guide­post So­lu­tions Louis Mil­ione said his ex­pe­ri­ence in law en­force­ment would be in­valu­able in achiev­ing a greater de­gree of part­ner­ship lo­cal­ly.

“From my ex­pe­ri­ence, I’ve been work­ing on bring­ing that ex­per­tise on how best to in­te­grate every­thing and how best to at­tack the threat that a spe­cif­ic lo­ca­tion is deal­ing with, how to re­move si­los and map­ping net­works to fig­ure out what’s go­ing on and deal with threats at hand.”

Mil­ione, who pre­vi­ous­ly served as a deputy ad­min­is­tra­tor of the Drug En­force­ment Agency (DEA) said he be­lieved that his com­pa­ny could al­so of­fer some as­sis­tance in treat­ing with mat­ters of drug and arms traf­fick­ing in­to T&T.

“That’s cer­tain­ly some­thing we dis­cussed with the min­is­ter, how you iden­ti­fy the net­works and at­tack the net­works, work­ing with all the au­thor­i­ties in T&T and all coun­ter­parts here in T&T.”

Guide­post So­lu­tions’ Chief Op­er­at­ing Of­fi­cer and for­mer act­ing as­sis­tant sec­re­tary of US Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty John Tor­res, who al­so at­tend­ed the meet­ing, said he was con­fi­dent that a more in­clu­sive use of tech­nol­o­gy in dai­ly op­er­a­tions for law en­force­ment could achieve sig­nif­i­cant re­sults lo­cal­ly, even in sit­u­a­tions where re­sources may be lim­it­ed.

“We think we can re­al­ly take some of these proven con­cepts that we’ve used with oth­er com­pa­nies and de­part­ments back in the US and ap­ply them here.”