Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

T&T Po­lice Ser­vice So­cial and Wel­fare As­so­ci­a­tion (TTPSS­WA) pres­i­dent, ASP Ish­mael Pitt, says ad­di­tion­al po­lice of­fi­cers would fur­ther bol­ster the strength and ef­fi­cien­cies of the po­lice in crime-fight­ing goals, as he ap­proved of re­cent plans aimed at in­creas­ing man­pow­er with­in the ranks of the ser­vice.

Dur­ing a state­ment to Par­lia­ment last Fri­day, Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Roger Alexan­der re­port­ed that the sanc­tioned strength of po­lice would be in­creased from 7,884 to 10,200 of­fi­cers.

Alexan­der said the ex­pan­sion of the po­lice ser­vice’s man­pow­er would be done on a phased, five-year re­cruit­ment pro­gramme, with 600 of­fi­cers in the first year, an­oth­er 600 of­fi­cers in the sec­ond year and 372 of­fi­cers in the third, fourth and fifth years.

He al­so not­ed that this in­crease in man­pow­er would stream­line ef­fi­cien­cies while re­duc­ing ex­ces­sive over­time claims.

Re­spond­ing to ques­tions dur­ing his ap­pear­ance on CNC3’s The Morn­ing Brew pro­gramme yes­ter­day, Pitt de­scribed the promise of more po­lice of­fi­cers as “long over­due,” not­ing that sev­er­al units of the TTPS have been un­der strain.

Re­fer­ring to the ad­di­tion of new units and du­ties such as the cre­ation of the School Ori­ent­ed Polic­ing Unit, the de­ploy­ment of tac­ti­cal po­lice of­fi­cers to the Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port and an in­crease in the num­ber of po­lice pros­e­cu­tors in court, Pitt said hav­ing of­fi­cers in these ar­eas would in­evitably lead to a short­age in oth­er units.

“Tak­ing all that in­to con­sid­er­a­tion, if you are tak­ing po­lice of­fi­cers from the same pool or­der to pop­u­late these dif­fer­ent units, then ob­vi­ous­ly some­one will end up los­ing of­fi­cers they had be­fore. That by it­self places man­age­ment un­der a tremen­dous amount of strain; it’s like mak­ing bread out of stone.

“The de­mands for po­lice have in­creased, we have an in­creas­ing pop­u­la­tion and that’s a fact, if you want to con­sid­er il­le­gal im­mi­grants, le­gal im­mi­grants, the fact that there are com­mu­ni­ties pop­ping up al­most every­where in T&T, with that we must have the req­ui­site amount of of­fi­cers in or­der to man this sit­u­a­tion.

“It is our in­for­ma­tion that it has been prob­a­bly about 30 years since the po­lice ser­vice got an in­crease in strength and you as well as any rea­son­able per­son will well imag­ine that with­in that pe­ri­od there has been an in­crease in pop­u­la­tion.”

Re­spond­ing to ques­tions on whether tech­nol­o­gy could be fur­ther in­te­grat­ed in­to dai­ly law en­force­ment op­er­a­tions to re­duce the need for of­fi­cers, Pitt said while in­creased tech­no­log­i­cal ca­pac­i­ties would be wel­comed, polic­ing by na­ture would ul­ti­mate­ly re­quire more di­rect hu­man in­ter­ac­tion.

He, how­ev­er, ac­knowl­edged that the evolv­ing na­ture of crime and law en­force­ment re­quired more tech­no­log­i­cal­ly com­pe­tent of­fi­cers to keep pace with de­vel­op­ing threats.

“We want po­lice of­fi­cers who are able to serve and serve pro­fes­sion­al­ly with de­vo­tion.

“We need tech­nol­o­gy be­cause we must be able to step up with the times in terms of new things hap­pen­ing with­in our en­vi­ron­ment, with that you must al­so con­sid­er the pop­u­la­tion you are polic­ing and whether you have the ap­pro­pri­ate amount of po­lice of­fi­cers to treat with that.”