Last weekend’s unfortunate incident during the Push Back Two march at the Queen’s Park Savannah in Port-of-Spain has raised a furore in recent days.
On the one hand, the organisers, participants and some sectors of society have been up in arms over the T&T Police Service’s handling of the matter, officers having deployed tear gas to disperse a sector of the participants they deemed to have been engaging in unruly behaviour.
The Guard and Emergency Branch has, however, maintained that certain elements of the protesting group refused to obey orders to disburse hours after the actual event occurred, forcing them to deploy tear gas to force compliance. Furthermore, they maintain that the act, though causing distress to scores of protesters, was well within the service’s use of force policy in such matters.
Protests are mostly planned events, although there is the possibility of them occurring spontaneously. T&T, however, does not have a real history of spontaneous protesting and most such activity, even of the issues spurred by Black Power Movement of the 1970s, is planned well in advance of its actual occurrence.
Sunday’s event was indeed organised, to the point where the group behind it applied for permission, never received a response from acting Commissioner of Police McDonald Jacob but still went ahead with the activity. This, of course, begs the question as to why the TTPS allowed it to occur in the first place, given that law and order during the current pandemic should be one of the pinnacles of their operation.
It should also be noted that all previous protest activity aimed at highlighting the public’s concern over the Government’s public sector safe zone policy and handling of the COVID-19 scenario has featured some sort of unsavoury engagement between participants and the police on hand.
This brings us to the unfortunate inference that there is often more than one side to a protest, with many elements converging to create a dynamic situation. During such activities, there are those individuals who have a genuine concern about the cause, those who have nothing but self-interest at heart and those who are out to create nothing but mischief.
It is quite possible, therefore, that Sunday’s unfortunate incident was sparked by a group of individuals who have no real concern about finding any resolution to the issue or to ensuring that the Government genuinely finds an amicable way to treat with all of society’s concerns about the handling of the pandemic and the vaccination hesitancy.
In that regard, it would be quite unfortunate that this latest activity would eventually redound to producing absolutely nothing that can bring about a resolution to the country’s current COVID scenario. In the end, we certainly hope it has not only served to push the Government further away from seeking more public dialogue on its plans going forward. However, given the daily rate of transmission and deaths, we certainly hope good sense will prevail and T&T can win the battle against COVID-19.