A quiet internal investigation by Commission of Police Gary Griffith has uncovered a massive $25 million per month overtime bill within the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service (TTPS).
The figure is three million more than the $22 million-a-month overtime bill Government officials recently claimed state-owned Petrotrin racks up.
In response to questions on the issue from the T&T Guardian yesterday, Griffith said he was “cracking down on white collar crime within the TTPS” as he highlighted “inflated overtime figures” as one of the white collar crimes currently taking place within the service.
“Our approach to dealing with the issues in the Police Service is two-fold. You hear or have heard reports of police officers involved in criminal activity and this is one of them,” Griffith said.
He said some officers have been taking home hundreds and thousands of dollars in overtime.
“It’s curious that it doesn’t raise a red flag to these supervisors signing off on that overtime or rostering the men for the overtime,” Griffith said.
He said because there were never the proper checks and balances in place, people found ways to take advantage of the system.
“Even if we cut that overtime in half, we would save enough of our budget to be able to improve the technology for the police officers, like laptops in cars, pepper spray and tasers for officers,” Griffith said.
One of the other matters Griffith is shutting down immediately is payment to officers to influence Firearm Users Licenses (FUL). He said applicants pay police officers between $20,000 and $80,000 for the licenses or to have their application brought to the top of the pile. But he noted only the CoP can grant and authorise an FUL.
“I am in no way implicating the former CoP in this,” he said.
He said some police officers may have made promises to applicants without having the ability to deliver.
“I am going through and expediting the process so no one should pay an officer for a FUL,” he said.
Griffith said the sluggish and often times stalled processes led to frustration among the applicants, pushing some of them to offer financial incentive to move things along.
“That is no longer the case. Some people will be approved, others won’t, but at least there would be movement and that removes the need for bribery,” he said.
Griffith had previously stated that there were some 13,000 applications for FULs on his desk.
Griffith is also stopping the private payments to police officers to attend large events. According to Griffith, the common practice now is to pay the attending officer by cash or cheque and that officer would pay the other attending officers.
“That has been stopped effective immediately. We are in the 21st century, there’s no reason people have to be paying officers by cheque or cash to come to an event,” he said, adding payments should now be made through the police station.
But with all the changes expected to be implemented, Griffith said he expects resistance.
“But the only persons who resist are the ones who benefited from the way things were,” he said.
However, he said increasing salaries within the service to attract enrolment is not in the cards.
“No, not at all. People who want to be police officers know the salary before they apply. We are making sure that no one is using the uniform to illegally enrich themselves. Who doesn’t like it can leave,” he said.