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Saturday, July 19, 2025

Hinds confirms 80 SUVs for Police Service

by

Renuka Singh
1375 days ago
20211013
National Security Minister Fitzgerald Hinds in Parliament.

National Security Minister Fitzgerald Hinds in Parliament.

Parliament

Renu­ka Singh

The Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty will go ahead with the pur­chase of some 80 Sport Util­i­ty Ve­hi­cles for the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice.

Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Fitzger­ald Hinds at­tend­ed yes­ter­day's Stand­ing Fi­nance Com­mit­tee in­to his Min­istry and briefly out­lined the al­lo­ca­tion for the ve­hi­cles.

"The plan is to pur­chase 100 ve­hi­cles, marked SUV's, un­marked SUV's, marked sedans, un­marked sedans," Hinds said, adding that there is al­so a plan to pur­chase 12 ve­hi­cles for To­ba­go.

Hinds said the TTPS cur­rent fleet stands at 1,905 and of that some 1,181 are op­er­a­tional. The bal­ance, 724 are out of ser­vice.

"Ap­prox­i­mate­ly 500 of those ve­hi­cles are con­sid­ered to be suf­fi­cient­ly un­ser­vice­able to re­quire dis­pos­al," Hinds said,

Back in Ju­ly dur­ing the open­ing of the Care­nage Po­lice Sta­tion, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley said that a note was brought to Cab­i­net seek­ing ap­proval to pur­chase some 80 SUV's cost­ing some $22 mil­lion and he im­me­di­ate­ly di­rect­ed a re­vi­sion of that fig­ure. Row­ley said then that the price was too high and those types of SUV's were not nec­es­sary.

The re­cent­ly launched River­ine and Coastal pa­trol unit un­der the TTPS was on­ly al­lo­cat­ed $29,000 for the next fis­cal year.

Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment for Na­pari­ma, Rod­ney Charles ques­tioned the low­ly al­lo­ca­tion.

"My un­der­stand­ing is that the prob­lem is sig­nif­i­cant, you have end­less re­ports of hu­man traf­fick­ing, drugs, il­le­gal im­mi­grants etc. How many ves­sels are there in this Coastal and River­ine Pa­trol Unit, what are the op­ti­mal num­bers of ve­hi­cles and is this fig­ure in any way ad­e­quate," he asked.

Hinds said there were cur­rent­ly two river­ine ves­sels and two coastal pa­trol ves­sels.

"That has to be a joke," Charles coun­tered.

"Two ves­sels? and two oth­ers for all of T&T?" Charles said.

The meet­ing then de­volved in­to a po­lit­i­cal one.

"Ap­par­ent­ly the Mem­ber did not know that be­fore the pub­lic chased them out of of­fice," Hinds said.

Hinds was again asked about the in­fra­struc­ture for this unit and ex­plained that the Coastal and River­ine Unit was on­ly es­tab­lished to pa­trol and op­er­ate around the two-mile ra­dius around the coast.

"This is a brand new, very pow­er­ful ef­fort on the part of the po­lice ser­vice to as­sist in the man­age­ment and con­trol of the af­fairs of our bor­ders. We are now start­ing out," Hinds said.

He said that the Unit was al­so staffed with 50 per­son­nel.

Hinds al­so re­vealed that on­ly three peo­ple have been fit­ted with elec­tron­ic mon­i­tor­ing since the pro­gramme was fi­nalised some two months ago.

The Elec­tron­ic Mon­i­tor­ing Sys­tem was pegged at $10 mil­lion in the last bud­get and was just $800,000 this year, a sig­nif­i­cant­ly small­er sum. That drop in al­lo­ca­tion was raised at the Stand­ing Fi­nance Com­mit­tee meet­ing yes­ter­day to dis­cuss the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty.

The Min­istry re­ceived an over­all al­lo­ca­tion of over $2.2 bil­lion.

Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Fitzger­lad Hinds and Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert at­tend­ing the ses­sion yes­ter­day.

When Hinds an­nounced the small num­ber of peo­ple "wired up", Oropouche East MP Dr Roo­da Mooni­lal want­ed more de­tails.

"But the project it­self in­volves much more than three per­sons? It was a rather ex­pan­sive project," Mooni­lal said.

Hinds said that thus far, on­ly three peo­ple have been or­dered by the court to be mon­i­tored elec­tron­i­cal­ly.

"The en­tire sys­tem is in place, up and func­tion­al. And it closed this coun­try just about $10 mil­lion with no sug­ges­tion of any un­to­ward be­hav­iour," Hinds said.


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