Clevon Raphael

?"Good day, Mr Raphael, I salute you on your con­tin­ued run of bal­anced com­men­taries which to my mind should be nec­es­sary read­ing for all.

"With re­gard to your sup­port of the De­fence Force play­ing a part in the at­tempts to stem the tide of vi­o­lence in schools, I wish to sug­gest that you con­sid­er, if agree­able, us­ing your col­umn to in­flu­ence those in au­thor­i­ty to look at the pos­si­bil­i­ty of de­vel­op­ing a 'boot-camp' mod­el for those mis­led and mis­guid­ed youths, sup­port­ed by psy­chol­o­gists and so­cial work­ers, and their fam­i­lies. "This has been used for many years in cer­tain ju­ris­dic­tions in the USA with a fair­ly high de­gree of suc­cess. I re­mem­ber see­ing some clips on a talk show some years ago, per­haps on Oprah.

"One has to re­mem­ber that these chil­dren are, at most times, not sub­stan­tial­ly at fault for their er­rant be­hav­iour, but are prod­ucts of a so­ci­ety and en­vi­ron­ment over which they have no con­trol. "Out of past per­son­al ex­pe­ri­ence, they would rather do right than wrong. "Of course this is not the on­ly so­lu­tion and oth­er ini­tia­tives must al­so be launched with the help of the many oth­er or­gan­i­sa­tions in Trinidad who feel no pride what­so­ev­er in see­ing their charges head­ing the wrong way. "I wish to of­fer you my hum­ble con­grat­u­la­tions and re­spect in your con­tin­ued pre­sen­ta­tion to the na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty (of) such well-thought(out) and fair-mind­ed com­men­taries.

Sin­cere­ly

David Bovell"

"Hi, Clevon. Be­fore you get up­set over my ob­jec­tion, al­low me to in­tro­duce my­self–your cousin Esm� Raphael, the sis­ter of Rawle Raphael. "I would like to sug­gest that you soft­en your tone a lit­tle with re­gard to your third item in to­day's Guardian (June 23): 'I am ab­solute­ly op­posed to the se­lec­tion of a for­eign­er to head the Po­lice Ser­vice.' "The Po­lice Ser­vice here in T&T has two ma­jor prob­lems which re­quire good skills:

"1. The man­age­ment of the Po­lice Ser­vice (man­age­r­i­al skills).

"2. The crime (a re­al crime­buster who has no ties with T&T).

"My sug­ges­tion is:

"1. Have two com­mis­sion­ers with di­rect re­spon­si­bil­i­ties as I men­tioned in (1 & 2). It would take at least two years to fix the man­age­ment prob­lems. I do not know what it will take to fix the crime.

"2. Send those po­lice of­fi­cers who have two and three years va­ca­tion on leave. That is a ridicu­lous state of af­fairs. If I can do with­out an em­ploy­ee for six months then I do not need you.

"Clevon, these are my ini­tial thoughts. I am al­ways of the opin­ion that we should al­ways make a sug­ges­tion for the so­lu­tion.

"Have a great day! God bless.

Esm�"

The above are two of the com­ments gen­er­at­ed from last week's col­umn, which top­ic I re­turn to this week with a great deal of dis­ap­point­ment and anger. But I would like to of­fer brief re­spons­es to the above mis­sives. First, I don't agree with the idea of a boot-camp sys­tem in this coun­try un­less care­ful steps are tak­en to en­sure that such an in­sti­tu­tion would de­liv­er the de­sired re­sults. There are sev­er­al types of boot camps or ver­sions of such and while there is no guar­an­tee that any can work here, any move in this di­rec­tion must be care­ful­ly thought out, tak­ing in­to con­sid­er­a­tion our cul­tur­al land­scape and all what that rep­re­sents. We are all painful­ly aware of the sense­less killings rav­aging our home­land and that a very large per­cent­age of these homi­cides in­volve young peo­ple ei­ther as the vic­tims or per­pe­tra­tors.

But we are caught be­tween the prover­bial dev­il and the deep blue sea in try­ing to re­store our coun­try once more in­to the safe haven it used to be. Sec­ond­ly, I re­main ve­he­ment­ly op­posed to the ap­point­ment of any for­eign­er as Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice un­less that per­son comes with wa­ter-tight guar­an­tees that he or she would get the job done–a dras­tic re­duc­tion in the num­ber of homi­cides. T&T has wast­ed more than $60 mil­lion, and count­ing, on hir­ing sundry for­eign se­cu­ri­ty per­son­nel over the last eight years, with noth­ing sub­stan­tial to show for that large ex­pen­di­ture in terms of cost ver­sus ben­e­fits. The large amount of cit­i­zens who want to see a for­eign­er in­stalled as the CoP is in­dica­tive of the frus­tra­tion we all suf­fer with the un­bri­dled reign of the crim­i­nals, who are tak­ing out who­ev­er they want with­out let or hin­drance. I am very much an­gry over the un­seem­ly dif­fi­cul­ty in ap­point­ing a Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice when the mur­der­ous crim­i­nals are very pro­duc­tive in the pros­e­cu­tion of their ne­far­i­ous ac­tiv­i­ties.

While the pow­ers that be and the cit­i­zens squab­ble over whether there should be a for­eign or a lo­cal top cop, we con­tin­ue to be at the mer­cy of these peo­ple who have no time for ex­er­cis­es in time-wast­ing. They are get­ting on with their jobs in a most ef­fi­cient and dead­ly man­ner. But we have to blame the last ad­min­is­tra­tion for putting us in the mess we have found our­selves, all be­cause of one man's love for "for­eign" over his own na­tion­als. No doubt he has been laugh­ing keif keif keh keh over the cur­rent im­broglio. I am ap­peal­ing to the PP regime to please hur­ry and rec­ti­fy this sit­u­a­tion as ear­ly as pos­si­ble, even if it means amend­ing the leg­is­la­tion to en­sure a sat­is­fac­to­ry con­clu­sion. Time is not our side.