Derek Achong

Act­ing Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Stephen Williams yes­ter­day de­fend­ed the work of the po­lice in east Port-of-Spain, say­ing crime was at its low­est in eight years and much of the crit­i­cism was un­fair.He said the pub­lic's re­cent crit­i­cism of the ef­forts of his of­fi­cers in east Port-of-Spain was hav­ing an ad­verse ef­fect on their morale.

In de­fence of the ser­vice, re­fer­ring to mur­der sta­tis­tics dat­ing back to 2008, Williams said: "As of to­day, we are less than 2012 fig­ures. From this you are get­ting a di­rec­tion that crime is on­ly go­ing one way in T&T–down­wards."Williams said mur­ders had spiked in 2008 with a record 547 mur­ders, a far cry from the low­er fig­ures to­day."We need to be guid­ed by facts. Talk is cheap," he said."The facts are that we hit an all-time high in T&T with mur­ders in 2008 at 547.

"You know what the fig­ures in 2011 and 2012 are? Three hun­dred and fifty-two, and 379. Check the dis­tinc­tion be­tween 547 and 352 and 379."How­ev­er, he ac­knowl­edged these sta­tis­tics might not be enough to raise the pub­lic's per­cep­tion of the Po­lice Ser­vice's per­for­mance.He said 2013, "from a polic­ing per­spec­tive, us­ing sta­tis­tics, has been a suc­cess­ful year."But it is not a suc­cess­ful year in terms of the per­cep­tion of the pub­lic, be­cause the gen­er­al pub­lic would want the so­ci­ety to be free of vi­o­lence," he added.

He said the crime sit­u­a­tion could not be im­proved sole­ly by the ef­forts of the po­lice. "We do in fact know that the Po­lice Ser­vice by it­self will not be able to ef­fec­tive­ly ad­dress crime to the sat­is­fac­tion of the cit­i­zens of this land, and it is in work­ing in part­ner­ship with the clear sup­port of the gen­er­al cit­i­zen­ry that we would be suc­cess­ful," Williams said.

"We can on­ly get to that point when we all work to­geth­er, law-abid­ing cit­i­zens and the po­lice, to make that dif­fer­ence so that the small group of in­di­vid­u­als who are hell-bent on com­mit­ting crime in T&T can be ef­fec­tive­ly ad­dressed."He en­cour­aged mem­bers of the pub­lic to as­sist the po­lice by pro­vid­ing in­for­ma­tion on crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty.He al­so told me­dia hous­es not to pub­lish re­ports which glo­ri­fied crim­i­nals and gang sus­pects.

"What we are say­ing is that it takes co-op­er­a­tion, col­lab­o­ra­tion and the sup­port of the me­dia for us to ad­dress the prob­lems in the land," Williams said.As­sur­ing the pub­lic that the po­lice were work­ing to re­duce crime fur­ther, he said the ser­vice will be in­creas­ing its num­bers through its an­nu­al re­cruit­ment dri­ve and is al­so plan­ning to in­crease the num­ber of po­lice ve­hi­cles avail­able to en­sure rapid re­sponse and in­creased pres­ence.

"The T&T Po­lice Ser­vice wants to give the gen­er­al pub­lic the as­sur­ance that we are do­ing every­thing pos­si­ble to en­sure the safe­ty and se­cu­ri­ty of our law-abid­ing cit­i­zens," Williams said.DCP Mervyn Richard­son, who al­so spoke at yes­ter­day's week­ly po­lice brief­ing, said the ser­vice was some­times un­fair­ly crit­i­cised by the mem­bers of the pub­lic, who might be mis­in­formed."We lost six peo­ple last week," he said, re­fer­ring to a spate of mur­ders in east Port-of-Spain.

"But be­cause of the in­ter­ven­tion and things that we did, we saved over 40 lives. So how many have we saved, how many we have moved from there and put in­to safe hous­es?"Check that," Richard­son said.