Gov­ern­ment is look­ing to a Vir­tu­al Po­lice Of­fi­cer (VIPO) mech­a­nism to al­low cit­i­zens to give in­for­ma­tion on crimes anony­mous­ly on­line in a bid to in­crease the "to­tal­ly un­ac­cept­able" crime de­tec­tion rate, stand­ing at 10.9 per cent up to Sep­tem­ber.Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Gary Grif­fith spoke about the VIPO mech­a­nism dur­ing yes­ter­day's Sen­ate ses­sion in an­swer­ing Op­po­si­tion PNM's ques­tions on the mur­der and traf­fic ac­ci­dent rates.

Grif­fith said there were 289 mur­ders dur­ing the Jan­u­ary to Sep­tem­ber 30, 2013 pe­ri­od, ac­cord­ing to po­lice in­for­ma­tion. He said the mur­der rate and road traf­fic deaths con­tin­ue to be two im­por­tant na­tion­al is­sues be­ing giv­en pri­or­i­ty at­ten­tion by the Po­lice Ser­vice.He said de­tec­tion rates on mur­ders were 21.9 per cent (2011); 16.1 per cent (2012) and 0.9 per cent (Jan­u­ary to Sep­tem­ber 2013).

Grif­fith said this year's lev­el so far would in­crease as more ev­i­dence was ac­quired and by year end may go back to the fig­ures that ob­tained in pre­vi­ous years be­tween 17 and 22 per cent. The de­tec­tion lev­el when the mur­der rate was the high­est in 2008–dur­ing the ex­is­tence of the Spe­cial An­ti Crime Unit–was 15.9 per cent, he added.Say­ing the de­tec­tion lev­el was "to­tal­ly un­ac­cept­able," Grif­fith said the prob­lem af­fect­ing it was in­for­ma­tion from peo­ple on crimes and crit­i­cal sup­port for po­lice op­er­a­tions.

He added: "There's a break­down of sup­port for peo­ple to give po­lice that in­for­ma­tion that's re­quired which can turn in­to ev­i­dence."It shows the need for cus­tomer train­ing. We need to weed out the rogue el­e­ments in the Po­lice Ser­vice and train po­lice how to deal with cus­tomer ser­vice for peo­ple to feel safe and com­fort­able enough to pro­vide in­for­ma­tion."He said the oth­er av­enue to in­crease the de­tec­tion rate was via the VIPO.

He added: "This makes every cit­i­zen a vir­tu­al po­lice of­fice. There's no per­fect crime, there's al­ways a wit­ness in some form or struc­ture and we need to ex­tract this in­for­ma­tion from the passers-by, on-look­ers, etc, and fa­cil­i­tate cit­i­zens be­ing part of the process in solv­ing crime. "But the chal­lenge is peo­ple are afraid to go to es­tab­lished state agen­cies as they lack con­fi­dence and trust and feel that some­thing will hap­pen to them."

Grif­fith al­so de­fend­ed the re­cent vis­it and in­put of US crime fight­er Bill Brat­ton whose trip, he said, was not an an­ti-crime ini­tia­tive as such.He said de­ci­sions were made for years based on "hit-and-hope" and not on em­pir­i­cal test­ing and re­search.