Akash Sama­roo

The Po­lice Ser­vice So­cial and Wel­fare As­so­ci­a­tion (TTPSS­WA) wants Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley to know that sport util­i­ty ve­hi­cles (SU­Vs) are not a lux­u­ry, but rather a ne­ces­si­ty for their line of work.

On Thurs­day dur­ing the open­ing of the Care­nage Po­lice Sta­tion, the Prime Min­is­ter an­nounced that he had turned down a Cab­i­net note re­quest­ing 80 SU­Vs for the Po­lice Ser­vice at a cost of $80 mil­lion.

The Prime Min­is­ter said he ques­tioned if any po­lice of­fi­cer ever need­ed to use a 4-wheel-dri­ve fea­ture and called the ve­hi­cles “fash­ion­able.”

He then in­struct­ed the Cab­i­net to find more “durable and use­ful” ve­hi­cles.

Yes­ter­day, how­ev­er, TTPSS­WA pres­i­dent In­spec­tor Gideon Dick­son told Guardian Me­dia that Row­ley’s com­ments were “rather un­for­tu­nate.”

He said the SU­Vs are in fact quite use­ful.

“The ve­hi­cles must be able to with­stand the kind of ter­rain that Trinidad and To­ba­go has, we have bad roads, hilly ar­eas but we al­so have to cater for the po­lice of­fi­cer who has firearms and oth­er items that he is mov­ing with when go­ing out on the beat,” Dick­son told Guardian Me­dia.

Dick­son added that po­lice ve­hi­cles work 24 hours a day and SU­Vs are con­sis­tent with the times.

He did ac­knowl­edge that some po­lice of­fi­cers may mis­han­dle the ve­hi­cles, but he said there is due process to dis­ci­pline them.

“We would al­so ad­mon­ish our of­fi­cers who may have act­ed in a delin­quent man­ner and we have a tri­bunal sys­tem to deal with that but by and large, those ve­hi­cles work all day, every day,” he said.

Dick­son, how­ev­er, agreed with the Prime Min­is­ter that there is a need for the TTPS to ask ques­tions of its fleet man­age­ment sys­tem which is tasked with over­sight on po­lice ve­hi­cles.

He said, “There might be dif­fer­ent schools of thought on how you man­age that. For ex­am­ple, should you, if a ve­hi­cle is down, take parts from an­oth­er ve­hi­cle that is down? All these things and then the bu­reau­cra­cy that goes with it, there may be a need for a whole re­view on where the gaps in the sys­tem are.”

How­ev­er, he said the so­lu­tion is not as sim­ple as say­ing the SU­Vs are not need­ed.

Yes­ter­day, Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith said he will re­spond to the Prime Min­is­ter per­son­al­ly and will “ad­vise him ac­cord­ing­ly.”

He al­so crit­i­cised the me­dia for fo­cus­ing on that as­pect of the PM’s re­marks, rather than the praise Row­ley heaped on the TTPS for their work dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.