An­na-Lisa Paul

The Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil (NSC) is trou­bled by the es­ca­lat­ing crime sit­u­a­tion and while they have ac­knowl­edged the fear that cit­i­zens are ex­pe­ri­enc­ing over it, Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Fitzger­ald Hinds has as­sured that steps have been tak­en to strength­en re­sources avail­able to law en­force­ment of­fi­cers to im­prove se­cu­ri­ty op­er­a­tions.

Dis­clos­ing this as he ad­dressed res­i­dents dur­ing an emer­gency meet­ing at the Aranguez Com­mu­ni­ty Cen­tre yes­ter­day, Hinds said he had been man­dat­ed by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley, as head of the NSC, to look deep­er in­to the oc­cur­rences of the spate of home in­va­sions which oc­curred over the East­er week­end.

Six ban­dits in­vad­ed Rasheed Ghany’s home at Ram­lal Trace Ex­ten­sion, Aranguez, on April 16, and ter­rorised and bru­talised the fam­i­ly for 15 min­utes be­fore rob­bing them of cash, valu­ables and al­co­hol.

In that in­stance, a va­ca­tion­ing po­lice of­fi­cer who lives in the area and is part of the neigh­bour­hood What’s App group, re­spond­ed to the call for help and was suc­cess­ful in killing one man and as­sist­ing in the ap­pre­hen­sion of five oth­ers.

An el­der­ly cou­ple at Be­jue­cal, Cunu­pia, were al­so tied up, beat­en and robbed at their home that very week­end.

Ad­mit­ting the oc­cur­rences had trou­bled both him and the PM, Hinds yes­ter­day said he had met with Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Er­la Hare­wood-Christo­pher and the Chief of De­fence Staff last week with re­spect to the wor­ri­some de­vel­op­ments.

“We are not po­lice, the Prime Min­is­ter and I, but we have a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to this coun­try,” Hinds said.

“The po­lice has the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to man­age the crime sit­u­a­tion in those ways, so we lis­tened to what the Com­mis­sion­er, on be­half of the po­lice, had to say and we lis­tened to what the Chief of De­fence Staff had to say be­cause the De­fence Force has been play­ing a sig­nal role in deal­ing with law en­force­ment for sev­er­al years in T&T.”

Hinds said both those heads had re­quest­ed ac­cess to more ve­hi­cles.

He said Gov­ern­ment was work­ing to sup­ply ad­di­tion­al re­sources to law en­force­ment.

“We pro­vide ve­hi­cles and we pro­vide re­sources on an on­go­ing ba­sis...as long as the po­lice ser­vice ex­ists, as long as the fire ser­vice ex­ists, the De­fence Force, all the agen­cies, they need re­sources to re­pair, to get new ones. It’s a work al­ways hap­pen­ing.

“So in this con­text, they want­ed some more ve­hi­cles and the Prime Min­is­ter man­dat­ed me as his Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty to en­sure that that is done.”

Hinds said he is ex­pect­ing feed­back from both law en­force­ment heads by to­day.

Lis­ten­ing in­tent­ly to the con­cerns by res­i­dents, who spoke of be­ing un­able to ven­ture out late at night or sim­ply en­joy time in their home gar­den and in­stead be­ing forced to bar­ri­cade them­selves in to try and avoid be­com­ing tar­gets, Hinds urged the res­i­dents to co­op­er­ate with the au­thor­i­ties, as they are work­ing to im­prove the sit­u­a­tion.

Ad­dress­ing al­le­ga­tions that res­i­dents were al­so afraid to trust the po­lice and re­port il­lic­it ac­tiv­i­ties due to fear of cor­rupt of­fi­cers, for­mer head of the North East­ern Di­vi­sion, ACP Win­ston Ma­haraj, ad­vised them to utilise the 555 or 800-TIPS op­tions, which he claimed were pri­vate and con­fi­den­tial.

The pan­el of speak­ers ap­plaud­ed of­fers by sev­er­al res­i­dents to as­sist with the fi­nan­cial costs that would be in­curred in or­der to in­stall se­cu­ri­ty cam­eras along all streets in the com­mu­ni­ty, as well of­fers of tech­ni­cal ex­per­tise in set­ting up the nec­es­sary se­cu­ri­ty ap­pa­ra­tus.