Richard Lord

Op­po­si­tion Leader Dr Kei­th Row­ley says the lat­est crime plan by the Gov­ern­ment–to pre­cept sol­diers–will fail if wit­ness­es can­not be pro­tect­ed. He spoke in yes­ter­day's de­bate on the De­fence (Amend­ment) Bill, which was pre­sent­ed by At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan. In his pre­sen­ta­tion, Ram­lo­gan pro­posed amend­ments to the leg­is­la­tion, in­clud­ing a name change to the Mis­cel­la­neous Pro­vi­sions (De­fence and Po­lice Com­plaints) Bill.

Row­ley took is­sue with the way the amend­ments were pre­sent­ed and asked Speak­er Wade Mark if the pro­ceed­ings were in or­der. Mark ruled that they were and the de­bate con­tin­ued. Row­ley lat­er told leg­is­la­tors that no amount of po­lice and sol­diers would be able to stop crime if cer­tain oth­er mat­ters were not ef­fec­tive­ly ad­dressed, and the sit­u­a­tion was more like­ly to get worse if the mea­sure was im­ple­ment­ed. He said the crim­i­nals were com­mit­ting crimes to­day in the hope they would be seen.

Once the crim­i­nal was seen com­mit­ting an of­fence and was lat­er ap­pre­hend­ed, he would let his friends know and "they'll know who the in­for­mant is and you are the next ghost." In­stead of wast­ing the Par­lia­ment's time on pre­cept­ing sol­diers, he said, it would have been more ap­pro­pri­ate to de­bate mea­sures to pro­tect wit­ness­es. He said cer­tain leg­isla­tive changes could be ap­proved to pre­vent crim­i­nals from in­ter­fer­ing with wit­ness­es.

"With­out wit­ness­es, there will be no crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. We are at that point in T&T where we are with­out wit­ness­es." To be a wit­ness in the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion was "pos­si­bly to sign your own death war­rant." He said the law should be changed to make it manda­to­ry for any­one con­vict­ed of in­ter­fer­ing with a wit­ness to get a se­ri­ous jail sen­tence. He said the penal­ty for in­ter­fer­ing with a wit­ness "must be equal or more se­vere than the crime that you com­mit­ted.

Un­til we get to that route, we're wast­ing time, Mr Speak­er." In­creas­ing mu­nic­i­pal po­lice should al­so be se­ri­ous­ly con­sid­ered as a crime-fight­ing mea­sure, he ar­gued. He said the Gov­ern­ment was spend­ing hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars on an in­ef­fec­tive re­sponse to crime and the po­lice ser­vice was fail­ing be­cause it lacked "prop­er in­ves­tiga­tive skills and tools to go af­ter crim­i­nals, de­tect the crime and hold the per­pe­tra­tor."

Un­til those mat­ters were ef­fec­tive­ly ad­dressed, "We are not im­pact­ing on crime at all." Row­ley said the right peo­ple should be hired to do foren­sic work, and on­ly then the crime prob­lem could be ad­dressed. Cor­rup­tion in the po­lice ser­vice must al­so be ad­dressed. "We are not ef­fec­tive­ly deal­ing with that," he added.

"We have to con­cede that the Po­lice Ser­vice is not up to the job at this time," Row­ley con­clud­ed. He said there were spe­cif­ic things the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice could do to strength­en the ser­vice with­out us­ing sol­diers as po­lice.