DA­REECE PO­LO

Se­nior Re­porter

da­reece.po­lo@guardian.co.tt

For­mer at­tor­ney gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi has warned that the pro­posed Law Re­form (Zones of Spe­cial Op­er­a­tions—ZOSOs) (Spe­cial Se­cu­ri­ty and Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment Mea­sures) Bill, 2026, could lead to the “mil­i­tari­sa­tion” of the State, as the Gov­ern­ment seeks to grant sol­diers po­lice pow­ers un­der new leg­isla­tive mea­sures.

The warn­ing over the bill comes amid ris­ing pub­lic out­cry fol­low­ing the po­lice killing of 31-year-old Joshua Sama­roo last Wednes­day. The in­ci­dent, which fol­lowed a high-speed chase, re­sult­ed in a ve­hi­cle crash and shoot­ing that left Sama­roo dead and his 28-year-old girl­friend, Ka­ia Sealy, paral­ysed from the waist down.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia on the grow­ing con­cerns re­gard­ing po­lice-in­volved shoot­ings yes­ter­day, Al-Rawi, who was at the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment’s 70th an­niver­sary cel­e­bra­tion at Queen’s Hall, St Ann’s, ar­gued that the cur­rent cli­mate demon­strates the po­ten­tial for the leg­is­la­tion to cause fur­ther harm.

“So, quite sim­ply, we’re de­bat­ing in the Sen­ate to­mor­row (to­day) giv­ing sol­diers po­lice pow­ers. We heard the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice say one thing which has turned out from the video ev­i­dence to be ap­par­ent­ly some­thing else. So, there is a huge ques­tion mark not on­ly about the ex­er­cise of po­lice pow­ers but, God for­bid, that you were to give the army po­lice pow­ers un­der the zones of spe­cial op­er­a­tions where they an­swer to the Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty,” he said.

Al-Rawi fur­ther con­tend­ed that the Con­sti­tu­tion does not en­vi­sion the Prime Min­is­ter de­ploy­ing the mil­i­tary for do­mes­tic law en­force­ment.

“We are head­ed to­wards a mil­i­tari­sa­tion of State. We ac­cept that the army may be used in aid of sup­port. It’s why we have called for the use of body cam­eras, par­tic­u­lar­ly in zones, but what is re­al­ly re­quired is an en­force­ment of bal­ance. You have to have the con­sti­tu­tion­al safe­guards in place. The po­lice killings, we call again for the use of the body cam­eras. We have over 2,000 body cam­eras avail­able right now that can be used and there is no ex­cuse why they are not on. The Po­lice Com­plaints Au­thor­i­ty will deal with the rest of it,” he added.

The for­mer AG high­light­ed the struc­tur­al dif­fer­ences in over­sight be­tween Trinidad and To­ba­go and Ja­maica, where sim­i­lar leg­is­la­tion ex­ists.

“Trinidad is not like Ja­maica. In Ja­maica, the po­lice and army don’t share the same pow­ers and in Ja­maica they have the In­di­com, which su­per­vis­es the army.”

The bill re­quires a three-fifths ma­jor­i­ty of 19 votes to pass. With on­ly 15 seats in the Sen­ate, the Gov­ern­ment must se­cure at least four ad­di­tion­al votes from the six Op­po­si­tion or nine In­de­pen­dent sen­a­tors to reach the thresh­old.