Jesse Ramdeo

Pres­i­dent Paula-Mae Weekes is ex­pect­ed to re­ceive the Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sion’s (PolSC) new mer­it list of nom­i­nees for Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice by next week. It will be the sec­ond list to be sub­mit­ted to the Pres­i­dent af­ter the last one was con­tro­ver­sial­ly with­drawn in 2021.

Guardian Me­dia was re­li­ably in­formed that the PolSC led by re­tired judge Ju­dith Jones will be­gin cal­cu­lat­ing the per­for­mance points of the 16 ap­pli­cants short-list­ed for the po­si­tion. Ini­tial­ly, more than two dozen peo­ple had ap­plied for the top post in the TTPS.

Sources said the as­sess­ment of can­di­dates be­gan last week with three can­di­dates be­ing ex­am­ined dai­ly for ap­prox­i­mate­ly two hours. The last con­tender was eval­u­at­ed yes­ter­day morn­ing.

Among those seek­ing to lead the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice are for­mer CoP Gary Grif­fith, for­mer act­ing CoP Mc­Don­ald Ja­cob, for­mer Pres­i­dent of the Po­lice So­cial and Wel­fare As­so­ci­a­tion ASP Anand Rame­sar and cur­rent Act­ing Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Er­la Christo­pher.

Now that the as­sess­ments have been com­plet­ed, the PolSC is on track to de­liv­er its fi­nal find­ings to the Pres­i­dent with­in the al­lo­cat­ed time. Last month they asked for an ad­di­tion­al month to com­plete the process.

The five-mem­ber Com­mis­sion re­ceived their in­stru­ments of ap­point­ment in No­vem­ber 2021 af­ter all the mem­bers of the pre­vi­ous PolSC led by Bliss Seep­er­sad re­signed fol­low­ing an im­broglio over the se­lec­tion of a top cop. That Com­mis­sion was ac­cused of be­ing po­lit­i­cal­ly taint­ed af­ter the ini­tial mer­it list was with­drawn.

The in­ci­dent fol­lowed the sub­mis­sion of a re­port to the PolSC by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley on the op­er­a­tions of the TTPS Firearms Unit.

Pres­i­dent Weekes was forced to break her si­lence over the scan­dal, deny­ing that she had par­tic­i­pat­ed or en­cour­aged im­prop­er in­ter­fer­ence in the sep­a­ra­tion of pow­ers.

While Dr Row­ley de­nied see­ing the 2021 mer­it list, dis­cussing it or giv­ing in­struc­tions about it, he did go on record say­ing that giv­ing Gary Grif­fith a chance to be CoP was one of his biggest mis­takes.