Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Al­lis­ter Gue­var­ro marked 100 days in of­fice yes­ter­day with a promise to con­tin­ue his cur­rent streak of out­pac­ing crime.

“To­day marks one hun­dred days since I as­sumed com­mand of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice,” Gue­var­ro said dur­ing a me­dia con­fer­ence at Po­lice Ad­min­is­tra­tion Build­ing, Port-of-Spain.

“One hun­dred days of re­cal­i­bra­tion, and might I dare say re­sults. One hun­dred days of con­fronting fear with facts, in­er­tia with ac­tion, and doubt with da­ta.” He as­sured, “The TTPS is no longer re­act­ing to crime. We are out­pac­ing it at this time.” In­dulging in some qui­et in­tro­spec­tion re­gard­ing both his ac­com­plish­ments and set­backs since June 18 to present, he laugh­ing­ly de­clined to grade him­self in terms of his per­for­mance thus far. In­stead, Gue­var­ro chal­lenged the me­dia and pub­lic to rate him.

“I con­sid­er my­self an em­ploy­ee of the State, and be­ing an em­ploy­ee, I don’t think that you would give your em­ploy­ee a Per­for­mance Man­age­ment Ap­praisal form and tell him full out that,” Gue­var­ro said. “Who does rate the em­ploy­ee? The em­ploy­er. So, you have to rate me, you tell me,” he said. In fact, an on­line poll com­mis­sioned by the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS), via Straw­Poll yes­ter­day, sought to get pub­lic opin­ion on whether Gue­var­ro’s ap­point­ment as the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice (CoP) had made a pos­i­tive im­pact on the or­gan­i­sa­tion.

Say­ing he had been stead­fast­ly work­ing to lay the ground­work to trans­form the TTPS since he as­sumed of­fice, the top cop claimed, “We laid the ground­work as we re­struc­tured de­ploy­ments, for­ti­fied in­tel­li­gence net­works, and be­gan our trans­for­ma­tion.”

He said this was ev­i­denced by the seizure of 41 il­le­gal firearms and over 700 rounds of am­mu­ni­tion, along with the de­tec­tion of near­ly 300 se­ri­ous crimes. But with the de­c­la­ra­tion of the State of Emer­gency (SoE) on Ju­ly 18, Gue­var­rro ad­mit­ted, “With it came a new tem­po, a new pos­ture, and a new stan­dard.”

Out­lin­ing some of the gains made since the SoE be­gan, he said the po­lice had tripled firearm seizures, dou­bled am­mu­ni­tion re­cov­ery and dri­ven na­tion­al de­tec­tion rates from 30 per cent to 35 per cent. De­tec­tion rates rose to 68 per cent in the South­ern Di­vi­sion, while it more than dou­bled in the South West­ern Di­vi­sion, he added

With a 42 per cent re­duc­tion in homi­cides com­pared to the same pe­ri­od last year, Gue­var­ro praised his law­men as he said, “These are not just num­bers.”

He likened these up­ward trends to “rup­tures in the crim­i­nal ecosys­tem.”

He added, “We have ex­posed the un­der­bel­ly of or­gan­ised vi­o­lence. We have dis­rupt­ed nar­cotics net­works, in­ter­cept­ed il­le­gal firearms and brought dozens of mur­der cas­es clos­er to res­o­lu­tion.

“We have not just en­forced, we have en­gaged through com­mu­ni­ty fo­rums, youth out­reach and of­fi­cer wel­fare pro­to­cols. We have en­sured that our pres­ence is not just felt, but it is re­spect­ed.”

He ac­knowl­edged that while the SoE had un­der­scored the lev­els of crime, “it al­so re­vealed that we had of­fi­cers with more courage, more co­or­di­na­tion, and more ca­pac­i­ty.”Re­spond­ing to ques­tions re­lat­ing to the re­as­sign­ment of ex­ec­u­tive port­fo­lios, which went in­to ef­fect yes­ter­day, Gue­var­ro said, “There has nev­er been a more uni­fied front in the TTPS.”

Point­ing to his three Deputy Com­mis­sion­ers seat­ed at the head ta­ble, the CoP lift­ed an open palm in the air, adding, “When you have a hand, a palm open like this, all you can do is slap as these are all in­di­vid­ual fin­gers. But when you clasp it to­geth­er, you get a fist, which is a more pow­er­ful weapon. This is the fist of the Po­lice Ser­vice you are see­ing here.”

Re­gard­ing the on­go­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to Deputy Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice, Op­er­a­tions, Suzette Mar­tin and her pos­si­ble crim­i­nal con­duct as al­leged by a firearms deal­er, Gue­var­ro re­spond­ed, “That was the first act of trans­paren­cy of my lead­er­ship, in that we re­ceived a re­port and we came to the pub­lic and in­formed them of the re­port.

“And just as in all cas­es, the TTPS stands ready to be able to in­ves­ti­gate it­self. An in­ves­ti­ga­tor was ap­point­ed and that in­ves­ti­ga­tion is still on­go­ing.”