Jensen La Vende

Se­nior Re­porter-In­ves­tiga­tive

jensen.lavende@guardian.co.tt

Pres­i­dents of two as­so­ci­a­tions with­in the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty, Fire and Pris­ons said suc­ces­sive bud­gets have not been able to meet the needs of their or­gan­i­sa­tions and they are doubt­ful this one will be any dif­fer­ent.

Pres­i­dent of the Fire Ser­vice As­so­ci­a­tion Leo Ramkissoon said one of the main con­cerns is a lack of equip­ment and fire trucks which has per­sist­ed for years.

“The fire ser­vice is run­ning at an all-time low. It seems like the bud­get is not tak­ing in­to con­sid­er­a­tion that we have a TT Fire Ser­vice that is run­ning like a par­lour, like a mom-and-pop shop. “

He said he un­der­stood that the re­sources are fi­nite, how­ev­er the ba­sic equip­ment should be pro­vid­ed.

Pe­nal and Ma­yaro Fire Sta­tions are the newest built he said but no ap­pli­ances were or­dered for them, adding that there are five fire sta­tions now with­out fire ten­ders.

“Is it in­com­pe­tence or is it a case of neg­li­gence or just dere­lic­tion of du­ty? You are spend­ing mon­ey on things to build nice large build­ings and you're not pro­vid­ing the safe­ty and se­cu­ri­ty mea­sures to safe­guard the pop­u­la­tion.”

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert is ex­pect­ed to read his ninth bud­get to­day and ex­cept for the years dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty re­ceived ei­ther the high­est or sec­ond high­est al­lo­ca­tion. Econ­o­mists are fore­cast­ing that the pat­tern will con­tin­ue with Ed­u­ca­tion and Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty bat­tling for the high­est al­lo­ca­tion.

Ger­ard Gor­don, Pres­i­dent of the Prison Of­fi­cers As­so­ci­a­tion said the re­peat­ed lack of re­sources pro­vid­ed to the prison in suc­ces­sive bud­gets have placed the pris­ons in a “down­ward spi­ral.”

“I must state that we recog­nise the ex­pen­di­ture in re­la­tion to the up­grades at the Re­mand Yard Gold­en Grove fa­cil­i­ty but has­ten to add that it rep­re­sents a drop in the buck­et as it per­tains to the over­all con­di­tions in the na­tions pris­ons.”

He said the as­so­ci­a­tion was not hope­ful any ma­jor changes would be forth­com­ing as “bud­get come bud­get go noth­ing hap­pens.”

“The year­ly al­lo­ca­tion to the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty may seem huge but cer­tain­ly isn't fo­cused on mod­erni­sa­tion, main­te­nance and up­grades to both the sta­t­ic and dy­nam­ic com­po­nents which are nec­es­sary for the ef­fec­tive and ef­fi­cient man­age­ment of the Prison Ser­vice.”

Guardian Me­dia called and mes­saged pres­i­dent of the Po­lice So­cial and Wel­fare As­so­ci­a­tion but re­ceived no re­sponse.

Econ­o­mist Dr Mar­lene Attzs said the way to ad­dress crime specif­i­cal­ly with the bud­getary al­lo­ca­tion was not a mat­ter of giv­ing the min­istry more mon­ey but a whole of Gov­ern­ment ap­proach where the so­cial ser­vices work close­ly with com­mu­ni­ties and schools.

Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty, she said, should step in when those two sys­tems fail. She said prop­er mon­i­tor­ing will iden­ti­fy those who are like­ly to grad­u­ate to crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ties from delin­quen­cy in pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary schools.

The con­ver­sa­tion should be shift­ed from mur­der fig­ures to di­ag­nos­ing crime, she added.

“Let us re­al­is­ti­cal­ly make some in­ter­ven­tions to ad­dress the dif­fer­ent kinds of crime. So if you have 20 crimes, and we do a prop­er di­ag­nos­tic and re­alise that there are four things that we can in­ter­vene in then that means you can ad­dress those for and then move up the lad­der, as op­posed to a broad na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty where the on­ly thing we look at is the num­ber of mur­ders.”

In the last eight bud­gets a to­tal of $48.164 bil­lion was al­lo­cat­ed ini­tial­ly for Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty. With sup­ple­men­tal in­creas­es the fig­ure rose to $49.481 bil­lion.