Jesse Ramdeo

Se­nior Re­porter

jesse.ramdeo@cnc3.co.tt

Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Er­la Hare­wood-Christo­pher’s wide­ly pub­li­cised vi­o­lent crime re­duc­tion plan is not pan­ning out as she penned it.

In fact, the Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er yes­ter­day ad­mit­ted that tar­gets set out in her plan to ar­rest spi­ralling crime were not be­ing met and that there have been in­creas­es in some crimes, in­clud­ing a 10 per cent hike in mur­ders dur­ing the ear­ly part of her tenure.

Hare­wood-Christo­pher made the rev­e­la­tion dur­ing a Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee on Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty yes­ter­day.

Re­spond­ing to a ques­tion from Com­mit­tee Vice Chair­man Paul Richards on how close she was to her June time frame for a not­ed im­pact from her an­ti-crime strate­gies, which she had pre­vi­ous­ly al­lud­ed to dur­ing her first JSC ap­pear­ance back in Feb­ru­ary, Hare­wood-Christo­pher said some marks have been missed.

“For our 20 per cent re­duc­tion in mur­ders, we are not able, so we are chal­lenged here, we have a 10 per cent in­crease in mur­ders. We have a 20 per cent re­duc­tion in vi­o­lent crimes, our tar­get is 20 per cent re­duc­tion in vi­o­lent crime, right now we at a 15 per cent de­crease.” Cur­rent­ly, the coun­try’s mur­der fig­ure has crossed 229. Hare­wood-Christo­pher’s an­ti-crime plan was premised on pre­ci­sion polic­ing and al­so aimed to re­duce mo­tor ve­hi­cle lar­ce­ny and im­prove the de­tec­tion rate, both of which have al­so not been on tar­get.

“A 10 per cent re­duc­tion in the lar­ce­ny of mo­tor ve­hi­cles, we have not been suc­cess­ful here, we just have a 1 per cent de­crease, a 5 per cent re­duc­tion in fa­tal RTAs, we have a 15 per cent re­duc­tion. A 30 per cent re­duc­tion in mur­ders, un­for­tu­nate­ly we are at a 12 per­cent de­tec­tion rate,” the CoP told the JSC.

“A 30 per cent de­tec­tion rate for vi­o­lent crimes, again we are on­ly at 16 per cent and a 15 per cent of firearms seized right now, we have bro­ken even with last year’s fig­ure.”

The Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er’s crime plan was crit­i­cised by sev­er­al quar­ters of so­ci­ety when she an­nounced in, with some even di­vid­ed over whether or not the strate­gies out­lined would be at­tain­able with­in her stip­u­lat­ed time pe­ri­od.

Re­cent­ly, Hare­wood-Christo­pher al­so rat­ed her first 100 days at the helm of the TTPS as “ex­cel­lent” and de­spite not be­ing on track to hit cer­tain tar­gets out­lined in her vi­o­lent crime re­duc­tion plan, she yes­ter­day con­firmed that some ob­jec­tives have been met.

Mean­while, ac­cord­ing to Deputy Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Curt Si­mon, de­spite not be­ing on par with the tar­gets that have been set out, steps were be­ing tak­en in the right di­rec­tion.

“Even look­ing at our crime re­duc­tion pol­i­cy that the Com­mis­sion­er would have un­veiled here some time ago, we are see­ing some move­ment to­wards that re­duc­tion in crimes that are hap­pen­ing, though I would de­scribe as mi­nus­cule, it is con­ver­sant with what hap­pens glob­al­ly with the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem are­na when a po­lice ser­vice ap­plies new tech­niques and so on, you find that the im­pact may not be as great as one would like to see but it is tran­sient and we are see­ing that slow trans­for­ma­tion be­gin­ning to take root.”

DCP Si­mon al­so con­firmed that po­lice of­fi­cers were be­ing trained in ad­vanced meth­ods of ev­i­dence col­lec­tion aimed at aug­ment­ing the in­ves­ti­ga­tion process.

The Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er said in an ef­fort to im­prove the Po­lice Ser­vice’s crime de­tec­tion rate, re­tired in­ves­ti­ga­tors will be brought back to as­sist with the train­ing of of­fi­cers.

Hare­wood-Christo­pher stat­ed, “We are fo­cus­ing on a ro­bust set of train­ing. What we are in the process of do­ing is the re-hir­ing of ex­pe­ri­enced in­ves­ti­ga­tors, of­fi­cers who would have re­tired, who are com­pe­tent to as­sist in the train­ing of our of­fi­cers.”

Al­so point­ing to the op­er­a­tion of gangs in Mal­oney, Pin­to and Ari­ma, Se­nior Su­per­in­ten­dent of the North­ern Di­vi­sion, Ker­win Fran­cis, said TTPS ex­er­cis­es have been on­go­ing to dis­rupt ac­tive op­er­a­tions of the in­di­vid­u­als re­spon­si­ble for crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ties.

“There are two pock­ets of gangs that ex­ist in the Mal­oney dis­trict. How­ev­er, we have es­tab­lished a di­vi­sion­al gang unit sup­port­ed by the work of the CID based at the Mal­oney Po­lice Sta­tion. We have been able to ar­rest and charge a num­ber of per­sons who were re­spon­si­ble for com­mit­ting a num­ber of gang re­lat­ed ac­tiv­i­ties in the Mal­oney dis­trict and are cur­rent­ly be­fore the courts on those charges.”