Gregory Aboud, president of the Downtown Owners and Merchants Association, right, makes a point while member Fred Donawa listens during a stakeholders meeting with the Police Service Commission Secretariat at Queen Street, Port-of-Spain, yesterday. PHOTO: DILIP SINGH

Gregory Aboud, president of the Downtown Owners and Merchants Association (Doma), has identified the T&T Police Service as just one of the institutions which has reached crisis proportions.

According to Aboud, other institutions like the health care system had also left a lot to be desired. Aboud was speaking yesterday during a stakeholders meeting with the Police Service Commission Secretariat at Queen Street, Port-of-Spain. “The teaching service has failed to motivate teachers to attend classes. How do you motivate health care providers? Aboud asked. At the beginning of the discussion, Aboud expressed concern that such a meeting, like many others he has attended, attempted to “patronise” members of his organisation.

“We have devoted hundreds and thousands of man hours to attend these meetings and we have found that over the past years we have been invited to consultations in which we just feel patronised,” Aboud said. He claimed that “effort was being made” to host such meeting to paint a picture that “things are difficult to implement and trying to do good for the country is a very steep hill to climb. “We have noted a steadily worsening situation. There is a lot of backroom talk about who is to blame,” Aboud said. Saying the sense of hopelessness had “set in like a virus” in T&T, Aboud said the greatest single deterrent to a man committing a crime was the fear of being caught. And criminals, he added, possessed no such fear. He said: “The sense of hopelessness is more serious than the swine flu virus.

“Communications have now become a big thing in Government which puts a very pretty colour on a very meaningless book,” Aboud voiced. Expressing pessimism about Government’s vision of “2020” Aboud said he believed it was not going to occur “within a sliver of time.” He added: “We are 50 years away from developed nation status. The principle management system that has failed us is performance management.” He lamented the situation of hard-working and dedicated police officers who still held junior positions. “And we have some big fat guys who could put down two plates of pelau and read three newspapers throughout the day and they are senior officers,” Aboud charged.