JAN­NELLE BERNARD

Se­nior Re­porter

jan­nelle.bernard@cnc3.co.tt

TTPS So­cial and Wel­fare As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent, ASP Gideon Dick­son, is call­ing on the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty to do more for the po­lice ser­vice in the up­com­ing bud­get.

ASP Dick­son yes­ter­day said there are im­me­di­ate steps which can be tak­en to im­prove the morale of of­fi­cers.

“It makes no sense you con­tin­ue to de­mand more of the po­lice and you are not pre­pared to put your mon­ey where your mouth is. So, it starts first­ly with re­sourc­ing us with the items of tech­nol­o­gy that are nec­es­sary for us to be able to com­bat crime from a tech­no­log­i­cal as­pect,” he said on CNC3’s The Morn­ing Brew pro­gramme.

He said there is a need to re­view and re-work the sys­tem for pro­mot­ing of­fi­cers.

“We are say­ing our pro­mo­tion sys­tem is a sys­tem that needs to be looked at be­cause it im­pacts up­on the morale of the men and women. We are say­ing ad­dress those things so that it will in­crease the ef­fec­tive­ness and ef­fi­cien­cy,” he added.

Ear­li­er this month, Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Fitzger­ald Hinds re­vealed that 34 of­fi­cers had been pro­mot­ed from con­sta­bles to cor­po­rals af­ter a sys­tem glitch wrong­ful­ly pro­mot­ed 29 oth­ers.

Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Er­la Hare­wood-Christo­pher lat­er apol­o­gised to of­fi­cers, de­scrib­ing the sit­u­a­tion as an anom­aly in the pro­mo­tions process.

Dick­son said in­creas­ing the num­ber of of­fi­cers should al­so be a pri­or­i­ty on the na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty agen­da. He sug­gest­ed that Spe­cial Re­serve Po­lice be ab­sorbed in­to the main ser­vice.

“It is al­so en­sur­ing that our 1,400 of­fi­cers that we are short (of), you are able to en­sure that they come with­in the ranks and file. I know ef­forts have been made to try to in­crease the in­take, we are just over 300 out of the 1,000 that were set to be done with­in this fis­cal year. We have our spe­cial re­serve of­fi­cers, who have been on the field from day one to present, who al­ready have both the on-the-job ex­pe­ri­ence and al­so have some of the aca­d­e­m­ic qual­i­fi­ca­tions. We are say­ing ab­sorb those per­sons,” he ex­plained.

Dick­son re­peat­ed that the as­so­ci­a­tion sup­ports us­ing body cam­eras by po­lice of­fi­cers. How­ev­er, he said there is al­so a need for more tech­nol­o­gy con­cern­ing fa­cial recog­ni­tion and bal­lis­tics test­ing.