SHAR­LENE RAM­PER­SAD

Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith says he wish­es the pub­lic could have the same sup­port for the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice that they have for him.

He made the com­ment af­ter a TTPS press con­fer­ence at the Po­lice Ad­min­is­tra­tion Build­ing in Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day. Dur­ing the press con­fer­ence, where Grif­fith did not speak, the re­sults of two polls were re­leased. Grif­fith con­firmed that the polls were con­duct­ed by in­de­pen­dent mar­ket re­search and an­a­lyt­ics con­sul­tant Ak­i­lah Pro­cope but were com­mis­sioned by the TTPS and not the PSC as Guardian me­dia re­port­ed pre­vi­ous­ly.

The first poll gave Grif­fith an im­pres­sive 80 per cent ap­proval rat­ing while the TTPS as a whole was giv­en a 59 per cent ap­proval rat­ing.

“If there is one thing I wish that I could change, it has to do with the ap­proval rat­ing for the TTPS to the ap­proval rat­ing for the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice. In the blink of an eye I would glad­ly switch places, if that could tran­scend in­to that of the TTPS and even my­self, go­ing to 59 per cent, I would pre­fer that. This is not about an in­di­vid­ual, the im­por­tance of this is to en­sure that the TTPS can con­tin­ue to de­vel­op,” Grif­fith said.

He said al­though crime rates have dropped to record lows, those records are mean­ing­less if the pub­lic does not have con­fi­dence in the TTPS. “Last year, the po­lice sta­tis­tics (showed) it was the high­est re­duc­tion in the per­cent­age of crime in 30 years but that means very lit­tle if the fear of crime is still there, it means very lit­tle if there is not a de­gree of con­fi­dence and trust in the TTPS.”

Speak­ing on the low rat­ing of his of­fi­cers’ re­sponse time (40 per cent) and pro­fes­sion­al­ism (50 per cent), Grif­fith said the TTPS is con­tin­u­ous­ly work­ing to im­prove the lev­el of ser­vice its of­fi­cers of­fer to the pub­lic. He said al­though some may ques­tion the low rat­ing of the TTPS over­all, the re­sults were very pos­i­tive.

“I heard some ques­tions where peo­ple say ‘well 59 per cent is not very high’ but very few places in the world you are go­ing to have a po­lice ser­vice where for every two per­sons, one per­son sup­ports the po­lice ser­vice,” Grif­fith said.

He said the re­sults in­di­cate that most cit­i­zens recog­nise and ap­pre­ci­ate the work of the TTPS. He gave an as­sur­ance that the TTPS will work to im­prove on ar­eas where pub­lic con­fi­dence is low.

“I give the as­sur­ance to the pub­lic that it does not mean we are go­ing to sit back and ac­cept this, we have a long way to go, we have a lot to im­prove and I give the as­sur­ance to the pub­lic that we would do so.”