An­na-Lisa Paul

Se­nior Re­porter

an­na-lisa.paul@guardian.co.tt

Al­most three years af­ter the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) launched its See Some­thing, Say Some­thing mo­bile ap­pli­ca­tion (app) to al­low the pub­lic to re­port crimes in re­al time to the po­lice, its sta­tus is now un­known.

And burn­ing ques­tions have now arisen as to the fea­si­bil­i­ty of con­tin­u­ing the project, which was re­port­ed­ly launched with­out Cab­i­net ap­proval back in No­vem­ber 2019.

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands from se­nior po­lice of­fi­cials that the project al­leged­ly cost the TTPS an es­ti­mat­ed $489,000 per quar­ter—which would have pushed the Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er’s mil­lion-dol­lar vote for “un­sanc­tioned projects” over the al­lo­cat­ed mark.

The See Some­thing, Say Some­thing app was launched on No­vem­ber 1, 2019, un­der the aus­pices of for­mer com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith.

Guardian Me­dia learnt that a re­view of the project was done in No­vem­ber 2022 to de­ter­mine if it had achieved its man­date and should be con­tin­ued. How­ev­er, no de­ci­sion was tak­en re­gard­ing the eval­u­a­tion, which start­ed dur­ing the tenure of for­mer act­ing CoP Mc Don­ald Ja­cob, who demit­ted of­fice in De­cem­ber 2022.

Guardian Me­dia was told it is now up to cur­rent CoP Er­la Hare­wood-Christo­pher to in­di­cate if the project will be con­tin­ued.

Dur­ing the launch on No­vem­ber 1, 2019, of­fi­cials ex­plained that the app al­lowed users to re­ceive emer­gency alerts on their de­vices even if with­out mo­bile da­ta. When ac­ti­vat­ed, po­lice could ac­cess the user’s im­me­di­ate lo­ca­tion and ren­der as­sis­tance.

Con­tact­ed on the mat­ter yes­ter­day, a se­nior of­fi­cial who re­quest­ed anonymi­ty said, “When an analy­sis was done over a six-month pe­ri­od, there might have been about five calls which would have giv­en crime fight­ers any­thing pos­i­tive at all.”

Notwith­stand­ing the thou­sands of calls re­ceived dur­ing the same pe­ri­od, the of­fi­cial said they got main­ly mi­nor in­for­ma­tion which 555, Crime Stop­pers, or calls to the po­lice E999 could have dealt with.

The of­fi­cial said the re­view was un­der­tak­en to de­ter­mine it was giv­ing val­ue for mon­ey.

Un­able to pro­vide the name of the con­tract­ed ser­vice provider yes­ter­day, the se­nior of­fi­cial said steps had been tak­en to de­ter­mine if an­oth­er com­pa­ny could pro­vide the same ser­vice at a low­er price tag.

“This project did not get Cab­i­net ap­proval and any con­tract over a mil­lion dol­lars is sup­posed to be ap­proved,” the of­fi­cial shared.

How­ev­er, the of­fi­cial said there were sev­er­al oth­er projects un­der the TTPS’ re­mit which were launched to achieve sim­i­lar goals and the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty’s Le­gal De­part­ment had been made aware of this and oth­er mat­ters.