Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith has laid down the law for the New Year by putting cit­i­zens who plan to break the law that his charges will be on the look­out for them.

In keep­ing with the new nor­mal, Com­mis­sion­er Grif­fith has warned specif­i­cal­ly against stag­ing par­ties in breach of the COVID-19 reg­u­la­tions and the il­le­gal sale and us­age of fire­works in pub­lic spaces.

The host­ing of par­ties in breach of the COVID pro­to­cols will no doubt be top of Com­mis­sion­er Grif­fith’s agen­da, giv­en the height­ened con­cern by Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh and the health au­thor­i­ties of sev­er­al su­per-spread­er events planned for the next few days in­to 2021.

In­for­ma­tion re­ceived from the pub­lic has put Com­mis­sion­er Grif­fith and his of­fi­cers on high alert for the planned il­le­gal events. From the in­for­ma­tion re­ceived, it would ap­pear that some cit­i­zens are try­ing to take ad­van­tage of the loop­hole in the COVID reg­u­la­tions by fash­ion­ing their events as pri­vate gath­er­ings of sorts to avoid ac­tion by the po­lice. Armed with this in­for­ma­tion now, how­ev­er, Com­mis­sion­er Grif­fith will be able to de­ploy re­sources to some of the trou­ble ar­eas, in­clud­ing Down the Is­lands, to break up such ac­tiv­i­ty and ar­rest those in breach.

It re­mains quite un­for­tu­nate that some sec­tors of so­ci­ety con­tin­ue to play Russ­ian roulette with COVID-19, par­tic­u­lar­ly now that we are aware there is a new strain rav­aging Eu­rope and forc­ing a fresh wave of shut­downs. Fur­ther­more, Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram is on record as say­ing it is quite pos­si­ble this new vari­ant may al­ready be here. Giv­en that scores of Trinida­di­ans have been repa­tri­at­ed from that part of the world in re­cent weeks, we can­not look past how dan­ger­ous su­per-spread­er events will be.

As such, this me­dia house sup­ports Com­mis­sion­er Grif­fith’s ini­tia­tive to shut down all the zess­er and wess­er events over the next few days. We hope, how­ev­er, that it is done with eq­ui­ty across the board and the wessers do not get blighs.

On that note, we al­so sup­port the TTPS’s ini­tia­tive to pur­sue those un­scrupu­lous in­di­vid­u­als who put up unau­tho­rised stands and sell fire­works to mem­bers of the pub­lic, as well as those cit­i­zens who buy and use them in com­mu­ni­ties, caus­ing dis­com­fort to oth­er in­di­vid­u­als’ lives.

The prob­lem of the noise pol­lu­tion caused by such de­vices has been raised by cit­i­zens an­nu­al­ly for decades but no gov­ern­ment has yet man­aged to put in place more strin­gent laws to ward of such ac­tiv­i­ty. At the mo­ment, the il­le­gal use of fire­works is pun­ish­able by a mere $1,000 fine. This year, how­ev­er, the TTPS can add the act of breach­ing COVID reg­u­la­tions if in­di­vid­u­als us­ing them are so in breach. Ei­ther way, it is like­ly the TTPS will al­so need John Pub­lic to as­sist them in en­sur­ing that these two vi­o­la­tions are ex­posed so that they can be erad­i­cat­ed for the wel­fare of the en­tire coun­try.