Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Act­ing Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Mc­Don­ald Ja­cob is as­sur­ing there is no in­ten­tion to close down the firearms unit of the TTPS or stop grant­i­ng firearm user li­cens­es (FULs).

His promise came dur­ing a press con­fer­ence on Fri­day at the Gym­na­si­um Po­lice Acad­e­my, Samaan Dri­ve, St James.

“There is no in­ten­tions by me or the ad­min­is­tra­tion of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice to close down the FUL de­part­ment or even to cease the is­suance of firearm user’s li­cens­es,” he said.

“Once per­sons reach the rel­e­vant thresh­old that is re­quired, they will be, in fact, grant­ed a firearm.”

He said since June this year, some 120 FUL ap­pli­ca­tions have been processed, with the Firearm’s unit com­plet­ing some 800 rel­e­vant process­es to its op­er­a­tions.

He not­ed, how­ev­er, there were is­sues oc­cur­ring with FUL hold­ers such as los­ing their weapons, the guns not be­ing stored prop­er­ly or even loss of them through theft and rob­beries.

He said this was the ori­gin of the 108 le­gal firearms used in crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty over the last five years.

He said these were some of the is­sues they hope to re­solve by re­work­ing the Firearms Act.

“Yes, I men­tioned we are re­view­ing the firearms act to­geth­er with the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al’s of­fice head­ed by OLEP and that is be­ing done to tight­en up par­tic­u­lar pro­ce­dures that are with­in the firearms act to en­sure that the ma­jor­i­ty of per­sons in Trinidad and To­ba­go can in fact be pro­tect­ed.

“We saw the loop­holes and it is nec­es­sary that we work on it.

“So all our ef­forts with the as­pect of le­gal firearms is to en­sure the safe­ty and se­cu­ri­ty of the hold­ers of the firearms, their fam­i­lies and the oth­er per­sons who ex­ist in the com­mu­ni­ty,” he said.

He said this was be­cause there were in­stances where FUL hold­ers ac­ci­den­tal­ly dis­charged their weapons harm­ing them­selves or oth­ers around.

We al­ready have the prob­lem ex­ist­ing with il­le­gal firearms. We don’t want the prob­lem now where le­gal firearms now turn in­to il­le­gal firearms in the hands of oth­ers or caus­ing death in our coun­try,” he said.

“So when we talk about the is­sue of le­gal firearms, it’s not to pre­vent per­sons from ob­tain­ing FULs but to tight­en up things for the ben­e­fit of all of us in the coun­try.”

As part of mit­i­gat­ing this, he said the po­lice in­tend to work with train­ers for FUL hold­ers to en­sure a com­pre­hen­sive pro­gram is in­stilled in them to re­duce such in­stances.

Al­so speak­ing at the press con­fer­ence was Pub­lic In­for­ma­tion Of­fi­cer In­spec­tor Michelle Lewis who in­di­cat­ed this week the TTPS seized its 600th il­le­gal firearm.

She said 103 of the il­le­gal weapons seized this year were high-pow­ered ri­fles.

She al­so said 12,850 rounds of var­i­ous am­mu­ni­tion were al­so seized for the year to date.

While these are alarm­ing fig­ures, Ja­cob ad­mit­ted, he said it is not enough work and more need­ed to be done to get these weapons off the streets.