Word of a team of US-based an­ti-crime ex­perts be­ing hired by a busi­ness lob­by group to help the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice dis­man­tle and pros­e­cute crim­i­nal gangs is the lat­est in a show of how law-abid­ing cit­i­zens can con­tribute to bring­ing this coun­try back to a lev­el of san­i­ty on the spi­ralling crime is­sue.

Sev­en months ago and un­know­ing to the pop­u­la­tion, the T&T Cit­i­zens Al­liance Against Crime, made up of T&T Cham­ber of Com­mer­ce mem­bers, NGOs and pri­vate sec­tor com­pa­nies, ap­proached Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Gary Grif­fith for his bless­ings to start a col­lab­o­ra­tion in the fight against crime. How­ev­er, the body did not of­fer them­selves. Rather, they co-opt­ed the ser­vices of for­mer Fed­er­al Bu­reau of In­ves­ti­ga­tions (FBI) Spe­cial Agent Robert Clark to do so on their be­half.

Clark has, among oth­er things, been cred­it­ed with re­duc­ing Los An­ge­les’ gang wars through his spe­cial­ly de­vised ini­tia­tives which hone in on the ex­act trou­ble ar­eas and de­sign pro­grammes to re­solve them. Our in­for­ma­tion sug­gests that the Al­liance would have sug­gest­ed that Clark be al­lowed to run a spe­cial­ist unit to bring down the gangs and crim­i­nal net­works across T&T based on his par­tic­u­lar ex­per­tise in this area.

This news­pa­per gives CoP Grif­fith cred­it for ac­cept­ing the help, since ad­mit­tance the ser­vice in it­self was floun­der­ing and need­ed such in­ter­ven­tion would have been a first step to­wards him re­solv­ing some of the is­sues. But Grif­fith has al­ways been known to adopt non-tra­di­tion­al ap­proach­es to achiev­ing goals.

In this re­gard, how­ev­er, we hope that this project, if it is al­lowed to come to full fruition, since Grif­fith can­not act on his own on such a ma­jor ini­tia­tive, is not de­railed by the fa­mous blue cur­tain.

His­to­ry will show that the TTPS does not ever ful­ly co-op­er­ate with “out­siders” whose man­dates are to clean up the sys­tem and weed out rogue el­e­ments so as to elim­i­nate the fa­cil­i­ta­tion of the crim­i­nal el­e­ments. We on­ly have to go back a few years to the ex­am­ple of Cana­di­ans Dwayne Gibbs and Jack Ewats­ki, who were forced out by of­fi­cers un­will­ing to al­low for­eign­ers to suc­ceed in the fight against crime. Grif­fith has been lucky not to have suf­fered a sim­i­lar fate, he, af­ter all, be­ing a for­mer De­fence Force mem­ber giv­en a chance to steer the TTPS ship ahead of oth­er po­lice of­fi­cers who had au­di­tioned for the same po­si­tion just over a year ago.

This is why we hope Grif­fith will now get all hands on deck to sup­port the ini­tia­tive to al­low Clark the op­por­tu­ni­ty to give a help­ing hand to fight crime.

It is safe to sur­mise that up to now, the crime-fight­ing ini­tia­tives from both the TTPS and Gov­ern­ment have failed to bring the sus­tained suc­cess need­ed. Last week’s Bail (Amend­ment) Bill may have been a start to a fresh im­pe­tus and Clark’s ini­tia­tive could be an­oth­er boost. Cit­i­zens de­serve no less now.