KEVON FELMINE

kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

While busi­ness­es com­plain about hir­ing peo­ple blind­ly as peo­ple can­not ac­cess Cer­tifi­cates of Char­ac­ter (CoC), the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) says em­ploy­ers can use their area po­lice sta­tions to ac­cess re­fer­rals.

Deputy Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice in charge of ad­min­is­tra­tion, Ram­nar­ine Sama­roo, told Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day that the CoC ser­vice re­mains down as the In­for­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy (IT) De­part­ment ad­dress­es net­work is­sues.

The TTPS ad­vised the pub­lic back on Feb­ru­ary 14 that it could not fa­cil­i­tate CoC ser­vices be­cause of a sys­tem mal­func­tion. The TTPS said then it was work­ing to re­store the sys­tem to its op­ti­mal func­tion. How­ev­er, the ser­vice is yet to be re­stored.

Ad­dress­ing this yes­ter­day, Sama­roo said, “It is a net­work prob­lem. Our IT de­part­ment is present­ly work­ing on it to have it re­solved. As to the time­line, we are not so sure. It could be up and run­ning by to­mor­row, or I do not know how long it is go­ing to take, but they did in­di­cate that they are ac­tive­ly work­ing on it to have it re­stored.”

Sama­roo said the TTPS un­der­stands the pub­lic out­cry for the re­sump­tion of pro­cess­ing CoCs. How­ev­er, he said they have to wait un­til the IT de­part­ment re­solves the is­sues.

In the in­ter­im, Sama­roo sug­gest­ed an al­ter­na­tive to em­ploy­ers.

“They can re­fer the per­son’s name and ad­dress to the po­lice sta­tion. We may have to do it man­u­al­ly to dou­ble-check the per­son’s name. It will not be 100 per cent, but we have a lot of po­lice of­fi­cers who are fa­mil­iar with per­sons, and they will be able to give a ref­er­ence,” he said.

Sama­roo al­so en­cour­aged peo­ple who hire live-in maids to dou­ble-check their em­ploy­ees’ back­grounds with their com­mu­ni­ty po­lice sta­tion. Po­lice sta­tions, he said, con­tin­ue to process ap­pli­ca­tions but will take some time to run back­ground checks. Ap­pli­cants can ap­ply for a CoC re­quest by vis­it­ing the TTPS web­site, fill­ing out a form, up­load­ing a pho­to­graph of them­selves and choos­ing the date they would like to go to any po­lice sta­tion to sub­mit their fin­ger­prints. Po­lice will use fin­ger­prints to check if the per­son has a record of their crim­i­nal data­base.

On Wednes­day, the Greater San Fer­nan­do Area Cham­ber of Com­merce (GS­FACC) and the Cou­va/Point Lisas Cham­ber of Com­merce (CPLCC) said em­ploy­ers were now hir­ing peo­ple with­out CoCs, open­ing them up to al­low­ing crim­i­nals and po­ten­tial of­fend­ers in­to their busi­ness­es. Not­ing that sev­er­al re­cent rob­beries were “in­side jobs,” the cham­bers said this af­fects busi­ness safe­ty and con­ti­nu­ity.

GS­FACC pres­i­dent Ki­ran Singh called on the Gov­ern­ment to ac­quire a new and up-to-date sys­tem for the TTPS that would al­low it to digi­tise its records and speed up the fin­ger­print­ing analy­sis process, which would al­so help in­ves­ti­ga­tors solve crimes.

Singh said many times when Crime Scene In­ves­ti­ga­tors dust sur­faces at rob­bery scenes and lift fin­ger­prints, they can­not match them to any­one. There­fore, crim­i­nals can go free and even find em­ploy­ment.

Mean­while, CPLCC pres­i­dent Mukesh Ram­s­ingh said when some em­ploy­ers ur­gent­ly need to fill a po­si­tion to pre­vent de­lays in their op­er­a­tion, they can­not af­ford to wait for the CoC ser­vice to re­sume.

Many peo­ple al­so com­plained that wait­ing on CoCs de­prives them of job op­por­tu­ni­ties and de­lays oth­er process­es that re­quire them to prove they have no crim­i­nal records.