A good case can be made for the fir­ing of Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Er­la Hare­wood-Christo­pher, based on her per­for­mance be­fore the Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee of the Par­lia­ment on an­ti-crime mea­sures, dur­ing which she was sure­ly re­quired to jus­ti­fy her stay as CoP and did not.

CoP Hare­wood-Christo­pher’s dis­clo­sures to the JSC in­di­cate that she and the T&T Po­lice Serv­cie (TTPS) have failed in crit­i­cal ar­eas of get­ting to the root of the crim­i­nal­i­ty that is threat­en­ing to ex­tin­guish the life of the peo­ple of this coun­try. Her timid­ness be­fore the JSC al­so did not paint a pic­ture of con­fi­dence be­fit­ting of an in­di­vid­ual charged with com­man­deer­ing a ma­jor arm of this coun­try’s na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty ap­pa­ra­tus.

Com­mis­sion­er Hare­wood-Christo­pher ad­mit­ted that of the 11 tar­gets set to re­duce crime over the last 12 months, not one of them was achieved, and by some dis­tance of fail­ure. While she did a bit of a wob­ble when asked by JSC deputy Vice-Chair­man Sen­a­tor Paul Richards who set the tar­gets, she even­tu­al­ly said all but one of the ob­jec­tives were set by her, the oth­er by the Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sion.

“We were un­able to achieve any of the tar­gets be­cause the tar­gets were a bit ex­ag­ger­at­ed. If we look at pre­vi­ous achieve­ments over the years, these tar­gets were nev­er re­al­ly met, so it was am­bi­tious to sort of en­cour­age the of­fi­cers to re­al­ly work to­wards reach­ing that tar­get,” the CoP told the JSC.

That the Com­mis­sion­er and her of­fi­cers were not able to achieve even one of the 11 tar­gets not on­ly com­pounds the fail­ure, but al­so in­di­cates a crit­i­cal in­ca­pac­i­ty for re­al­is­tic plan­ning, which must sure­ly be the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of any po­lice com­mis­sion­er.

One oth­er ma­jor weak­ness of the CoP’s in­abil­i­ty as re­vealed in the JSC, was in her ad­mis­sion in re­la­tion to the num­ber of the gangs and crim­i­nals that ex­ist and are plagu­ing the so­ci­ety.

“We have a rel­a­tive­ly small num­ber of of­fend­ers … who are re­spon­si­ble.”

The coun­try can there­fore con­clude that the task of cap­tur­ing and charg­ing these crim­i­nals is not an almighty and im­pos­si­ble one; that we in the so­ci­ety are not over­run by crim­i­nals and their gangs; and that they are pre­sum­ably well-known to the po­lice and are not hid­ing in in­ac­ces­si­ble places.

Then why this out­stand­ing pauci­ty in the achieve­ment of the task of cor­ralling these crim­i­nals, find­ing the ev­i­dence to con­vict them and so put them out of cir­cu­la­tion? More­over, why are the po­lice and oth­er arms of law en­force­ment at least not cur­tail­ing the growth and de­vel­op­ment in this crim­i­nal cul­ture that has con­sis­tent­ly re­sult­ed in over 500 mur­ders an­nu­al­ly, in rob­beries, home in­va­sions, rapes, kid­nap­pings and oth­er forms of crim­i­nal vi­o­lence against cit­i­zens?

Yet an­oth­er fail­ure of Com­mis­sion­er Hare­wood-Christo­pher, again through her own ad­mis­sion, is that of the con­tin­u­ing in­abil­i­ty of the po­lice to find and pros­e­cute those re­spon­si­ble for the im­por­ta­tion of the tools of crime and for the or­gan­i­sa­tion and ma­jor ben­e­fi­cia­ries of the crim­i­nal en­ter­prise.

“We know that firearms, gangs, and drugs, are the ma­jor is­sue that chal­lenge us, so that we are fo­cus­ing on re­duc­ing the firearms and the drugs,” was her quite flac­cid, weak re­sponse on those cen­tral is­sues.

Over­all, this news­pa­per has been fair and even en­cour­ag­ing of Com­mis­sion­er Hare­wood-Christo­pher. How­ev­er, by her own ad­mis­sion, she has failed.