For­mer Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith has crit­i­cised the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) for is­su­ing a me­dia re­lease in­di­cat­ing that it would rec­om­mend an­oth­er State of Emer­gency (SoE).

Re­spond­ing to Guardian Me­dia‘s ques­tions this morn­ing, Grif­fith chas­tised the Po­lice Ser­vice’s lead­er­ship for dis­clos­ing what he de­scribed as clas­si­fied, sen­si­tive in­for­ma­tion to the pub­lic—es­pe­cial­ly as it in­volved a pur­port­ed large-scale or­gan­ised crime threat.

“You let the pub­lic and the crim­i­nals be aware that we [the po­lice] don’t have the ca­pa­bil­i­ties to se­cure you, so we want the gov­ern­ment to help us by call­ing a State of Emer­gency.

“What should have hap­pened is if the gov­ern­ment them­selves say, ‘Lis­ten, we want to call a State of Emer­gency… enough is enough… Com­mis­sion­er, what do you think?’ And the Com­mis­sion­er will send cor­re­spon­dence to agree.

“That will all be done to a de­gree of con­fi­den­tial­i­ty of doc­u­men­ta­tion un­til a de­ci­sion is made to call a State of Emer­gency or not!”

Grif­fith main­tained that he did not sup­port the use of an SoE as a long-term crime sup­pres­sion tool.

He ar­gued that the po­lice al­ready had the re­sources and ca­pa­bil­i­ties to ef­fec­tive­ly com­bat crime with­out re­quir­ing ad­di­tion­al sup­port through an SoE.

“You can lift the na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty alert state, utilise the 5,000 mem­bers of the T&T De­fence Force who are in camp on stand­by since 1990, im­prove tac­ti­cal aware­ness, en­hance ma­jor op­er­a­tions, in­crease high vis­i­bil­i­ty as a de­ter­rent… take the fight to crim­i­nals, as we did in 2018 to 2021.

“You do not have to call a State of Emer­gency… the on­ly dif­fer­ence a State of Emer­gency makes is that you can hold per­sons in­def­i­nite­ly and break in­to homes with­out a war­rant.”

Grif­fith al­so crit­i­cised the cur­rent Min­is­ter of Jus­tice, De­vesh Ma­haraj, for re­main­ing silent on plans to dis­man­tle or­gan­ised crime groups op­er­at­ing even be­hind prison walls.

Un­der the list of min­is­te­r­i­al re­spon­si­bil­i­ties, the Trinidad and To­ba­go Prison Ser­vice is joint­ly over­seen by the Min­is­ters of Jus­tice and Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty.

Re­fer­ring to the TTPS me­dia re­lease which re­port­ed that the threat to na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty orig­i­nat­ed from in­side the prison sys­tem, Grif­fith said it was un­ac­cept­able that gangs could ex­ert such in­flu­ence and co­or­di­nate at­tacks against high-pro­file fig­ures.

“So be­cause of the fail­ure of those in the Min­istry of Jus­tice, it has forced the po­lice to call for a State of Emer­gency.”

He al­so ar­gued that dis­clos­ing covert po­lice op­er­a­tions pub­licly could jeop­ar­dise their suc­cess, as se­cre­cy is es­sen­tial to their ef­fec­tive­ness.