Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Er­la Hare­wood-Christo­pher yes­ter­day ad­mit­ted that her 2023 vi­o­lent crime re­duc­tion plan had failed.

At a Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee sit­ting called as a fol­low-up in­quiry to gain an un­der­stand­ing of the an­ti-crime strate­gies im­ple­ment­ed and be­ing im­ple­ment­ed to ad­dress crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty in Trinidad and To­ba­go, Hare­wood-Christo­pher said the tar­gets were not met de­spite some progress be­ing made in crime fight­ing.

JSC vice chair­man Paul Richards asked, “You set some tar­gets that you would achieve as at De­cem­ber 31, 2023, you did in­di­cate at the start that you did not meet the tar­gets, there were 11 spe­cif­ic tar­gets iden­ti­fied, 30 per cent de­tec­tion rate for vi­o­lent crimes, 30 per cent de­tec­tion rate for homi­cides, 15 per cent in­crease in firearm re­trieval rate, 15 per cent re­duc­tion in se­ri­ous crime, 20 per cent re­duc­tion in homi­cides, 20 per cent re­duc­tion in vi­o­lent crimes, ten per cent re­duc­tion in lar­ce­ny of mo­tor ve­hi­cles, five per cent re­duc­tion in road traf­fic fa­tal­i­ties and you al­so iden­ti­fied 20 per­sons charged un­der the An­ti-gang Act. Can you iden­ti­fy which of these tar­gets were met?”

Hare­wood-Christo­pher in­di­cat­ed that ef­forts had fall­en short.

“We were un­able to achieve any of the tar­gets be­cause the tar­gets were a bit ex­ag­ger­at­ed (what does that mean), 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,” she said.

The Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er fur­ther ex­plained that in oth­er ar­eas, the re­sults were al­so off the in­tend­ed tar­get.

“A 20 per cent re­duc­tion in mur­ders, we did achieve just about a five per cent re­duc­tion com­pared to the pre­vi­ous year.

“In terms of vi­o­lent crime re­duc­tion, we would have worked to­wards a 20 per cent re­duc­tion, how­ev­er, we were un­able to achieve a 20 per cent re­duc­tion, we had a 15 per cent re­duc­tion in se­ri­ous crime.”

Last May, Hare­wood-Christo­pher had rat­ed her per­for­mance as ex­cel­lent. How­ev­er, as she ap­peared be­fore the JSC yes­ter­day, she de­scribed her one-year tenure as chal­leng­ing, say­ing, “2023 has been a chal­leng­ing year for the po­lice as we con­tin­ue to con­front our brazen, in­no­v­a­tive and de­ter­mined crim­i­nal el­e­ments.”

The CoP said in light of the lack of suc­cess of some of the an­ti-crime strate­gies, changes will be made in an ef­fort to pre­vent the fur­ther ero­sion of pub­lic con­fi­dence in the TTPS.

“When we set the tar­gets, then we are held to it and don’t achieve it and then it looks as though the po­lice not achieve any of its tar­gets, so I be­lieve I can­not be so am­bi­tious and set stretched tar­gets again,” she said.

Af­ter dis­ap­point­ing com­mit­tee mem­bers by fail­ing to ap­pear be­fore an ini­tial JSC meet­ing last Feb­ru­ary, Hare­wood-Christo­pher, who ap­peared at a sub­se­quent ses­sion, had promised there would be a re­duc­tion in the mur­der rate with­in three months.

“We will ex­pect to see a change in the mur­der rate short-term by June and long-term by De­cem­ber,” she said then.

How­ev­er, dur­ing a JSC in May 2023, she in­di­cat­ed that the crime re­duc­tion plan was off tar­get.

Last year’s mur­der fig­ure crossed 580, falling short of 2022’s to­tal of 598.

Yes­ter­day, the top CoP, who had al­so pre­vi­ous­ly been crit­i­cised for sug­gest­ing that di­vine in­ter­ven­tion was need­ed to ad­dress the coun­try’s crime scourge, as­sured the JSC mem­bers that the po­lice ser­vice will con­tin­ue tak­ing a tar­get­ed ap­proach to re­duc­ing crime.

“We have a rel­a­tive­ly small num­ber of of­fend­ers and we com­mit to con­tin­ue to tar­get these of­fend­ers who are re­spon­si­ble and, of course, we are go­ing to use all the avail­able re­sources and we are re­view­ing our tech­nol­o­gy ad­di­tion­al­ly as we con­tin­ue.

“We know that firearms, gangs guns and drugs, they are the ma­jor is­sue that chal­lenge us, so that we are fo­cus­ing on re­duc­ing the firearms and the drugs.”

Ac­cord­ing to Hare­wood-Christo­pher, there has al­so been in­creased col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween mem­bers of the TTPS and the Cus­toms and Ex­cise Di­vi­sion, in an ef­fort to in­ter­cept il­le­gal firearms bound for the coun­try.

“At our lev­el, we would have had dis­cus­sions with the comp­trol­ler of cus­toms so we have joint op­er­a­tions go­ing on,” she said.