JOSHUA SEEMU­N­GAL

Some Se­nior Su­per­in­ten­dents of Po­lice who head po­lice di­vi­sions, are al­leged­ly de­mand­ing as much as $100,000 to $200,000 in cash from pro­mot­ers to pro­vide se­cu­ri­ty ser­vices at fetes, well placed po­lice sources and sev­er­al pro­mot­ers have re­vealed to Guardian Me­dia.

They said while many se­nior su­per­in­ten­dents are rea­son­able with their de­mands, oth­ers are ex­ploit­ing the sit­u­a­tion to line their pock­ets.

“At the end of the day, it’s like you’re work­ing for the po­lice. You work­ing for them, be­cause ac­tu­al­ly, their bill is the high­est…Greater ef­forts must be made to bring these pay­ments in line. So, you can’t have 3,000 peo­ple and your bill is $100,000. That doesn’t hap­pen in any oth­er part of the world,” well-known pro­mot­er Randy Glas­gow said.

“This is an ex­tra du­ty, so it’s over­time. That is why this whole rack­et is run­ning be­cause it’s over­time for po­lice of­fi­cers to make. It goes di­rect­ly to the of­fi­cers.

“When we have to pay this, we have to pay this in cash to the po­lice ser­vice,” said an­oth­er pop­u­lar pro­mot­er, who spoke on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty.

For close to two years, the en­ter­tain­ment in­dus­try was shut down due to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

While some risked a heavy fine and ar­rest by ig­nor­ing the pub­lic health reg­u­la­tions, most of the coun­try act­ed re­spon­si­bly, avoid­ing par­ty­ing at the height of the pan­dem­ic.

Now, with the re­moval of the pub­lic health re­stric­tions, par­ties and oth­er events are back in full swing.

With it is a long-stand­ing is­sue that many pro­mot­ers be­lieve is lead­ing to the un­eth­i­cal en­rich­ment of some po­lice of­fi­cers and is threat­en­ing the vi­a­bil­i­ty of the lo­cal en­ter­tain­ment sec­tor.

“When you come across some­one un­rea­son­able, it comes to a sit­u­a­tion where you feel like, ba­si­cal­ly, po­lice turn thief and they rob you. That’s the feel­ing you get. The peo­ple who are sup­posed to be pro­tect­ing you from ban­dit­ry, they are the ones rob­bing you,” a pro­mot­er com­plained.

With Car­ni­val 2023 on the hori­zon, mem­bers of the Pro­mot­ers As­so­ci­a­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go (PATT) and oth­ers in the in­dus­try are hop­ing that a sys­tem is put in place that is more trans­par­ent.

For par­ty pro­mot­ers to ob­tain a bar li­cense, they must go be­fore the court and show proof that po­lice and fire of­fi­cers will be at the event. The num­ber of of­fi­cers present is de­ter­mined by the se­nior su­per­in­ten­dent at the po­lice sta­tion lo­cat­ed clos­est to where the event will be held.

The se­nior of­fi­cer is sup­posed to do re­search on the rep­u­ta­tion of pro­mot­ers and dis­cuss as­pects of the par­ty with them—at­ten­dance, venue, type of crowd—and then de­cide how many of­fi­cers should be as­signed.

Each of­fi­cer must be paid, so the more of­fi­cers re­quired, the larg­er the fee pro­mot­ers must pay.

“The is­sue is how they de­cide on how many po­lice of­fi­cers to send to the event. That’s the prob­lem. It’s sub­jec­tive and based on their whim and fan­cy. They should be us­ing a for­mu­la that could cal­cu­late it,” pres­i­dent of PATT Jerome “Rome” Pre­cil­la said.

“It’s a wide range. Po­lice of­fi­cers could cost a pro­mot­er from $10,000 to up to $200,000. Be­cause there was a fete this sum­mer that did over $100,000 in po­lice, and this is just one fete.

“Some­times you have two par­ties in the same venue, and you just have a dif­fer­ent pro­mot­er do­ing that fete and the po­lice will change how many of­fi­cers they want to send. You can’t pre­dict.”

There is al­so a lack of ac­count­abil­i­ty on the day of the event, ac­cord­ing to Pre­cil­la.

Even if a par­ty pro­mot­er is charged, for ex­am­ple, $100,000 for 100 po­lice of­fi­cers, the pro­mot­er isn’t al­lowed to do a check how many of­fi­cers turned up to work at the fete.

“When the po­lice reach the event, they don’t want to line up in a pa­rade for you to see how many of­fi­cers came. So some­times if the po­lice say they are send­ing 50 of­fi­cers to your event, you may see a whole set of po­lice come, but they don’t line up to let you see if there’s ac­tu­al­ly 50,” he com­plained.

“What’s sup­posed to hap­pen is that if they don’t send 50 of­fi­cers and they on­ly send 40 of­fi­cers, they are sup­posed to give you a re­fund on the of­fi­cers that didn’t come. Some­times you’ll get an of­fi­cer who will say, yeah, on­ly 30 of­fi­cers come, you could go and get a re­fund, but not all the time that’s go­ing to hap­pen.”

Ghost po­lice

For­mer com­mis­sion­er of po­lice Gary Grif­fith said the is­sue was of great con­cern to him dur­ing his tenure. He con­firmed that pro­mot­ers were not able to do a check on the num­ber of po­lice of­fi­cers who turned up for du­ty.

Grif­fith agreed with Pre­cil­la that the sys­tem lacks ac­count­abil­i­ty.

He said when he was com­mis­sion­er, the ser­vice re­alised some se­nior of­fi­cers were al­lo­cat­ing large num­bers of of­fi­cers to fetes with­out even look­ing at the num­ber of peo­ple ex­pect­ed to at­tend the event.

“What made it worse, and was of con­cern to the Prime Min­is­ter, was the de­mand that the pay­ment is made in cash. 100 po­lice of­fi­cers and you have to pay say $100,000 in cash. It was dif­fi­cult for pro­mot­ers.

“The pro­mot­ers then had to go to the bank for cash, and then again, if 30 of­fi­cers show up, it means that $70,000 could just dis­ap­pear in the hands of some­one,” Grif­fith said.

To stop that, Grif­fith said the ser­vice de­cid­ed to cre­ate an ac­count for pro­mot­ers to make their pay­ments. He said a plan was ap­proved so pro­mot­ers would sign a cheque and de­posit it in­to the ac­count. From the po­lice ser­vice ac­count, the funds would then go in­to the salaries of the of­fi­cers who worked the event.

Con­tin­ues on page 7

“I know there would be re­luc­tance by cer­tain po­lice of­fi­cers—a very few—be­cause they would pre­fer the old time sys­tem that I tried to elim­i­nate by us­ing cash, and when you pay with cash, you can have ghost po­lice of­fi­cers and then you’ll have ex­cess funds that will just go in­to the wrong hands,” Grif­fith said.

Five pro­mot­ers all said they are re­quired to make pay­ments to the se­nior su­per­in­ten­dents in cash for se­cu­ri­ty ser­vices at fetes. They said in most in­stances they were not al­lowed to check the num­ber of po­lice of­fi­cers who re­port­ed to du­ty.

To the in­dus­try’s demise

Des­per­ate to re­solve the is­sues af­fect­ing its mem­ber­ship, the PATT sent let­ters to for­mer At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi point­ing out that arrange­ments be­tween pro­mot­ers and the po­lice and fire ser­vice for se­cu­ri­ty at events are coun­ter­pro­duc­tive.

Ac­cord­ing to PATT’s re­search, the ap­pli­ca­tion process for a bar li­cence is unique, and not for the right rea­sons. In New York City, Cana­da and the Unit­ed King­dom, po­lice and fire of­fi­cers are not re­quired for an event. Fire of­fi­cers in­spect the venue be­fore­hand, while pri­vate se­cu­ri­ty per­son­nel are hired by the venue or the pro­mot­er to main­tain or­der.

In Flori­da, po­lice of­fi­cers are as­signed to venues in small num­bers be­cause the pro­mot­er al­so em­ploys se­cu­ri­ty per­son­nel.

Clos­er to home, in Bar­ba­dos, Ja­maica, Guyana and Grena­da, the pres­ence of po­lice and fire of­fi­cers is not manda­to­ry. Se­cu­ri­ty guards are hired by the pro­mot­er. In Ja­maica, po­lice pass through the event to check in, while in Grena­da a min­i­mum num­ber of po­lice of­fi­cers are as­signed if the na­tion­al sta­di­um or a gov­ern­ment-owned venue is used.

In the Ba­hamas and the Cay­man Is­lands, fire of­fi­cers are not re­quired, while the pro­mot­er and po­lice have a meet­ing to dis­cuss po­lice strength.

To fix the is­sue lo­cal­ly, PATT made the fol­low­ing rec­om­men­da­tions:

Use an event risk as­sess­ment and po­lice strength cal­cu­la­tor to de­ter­mine the num­ber of po­lice of­fi­cers re­quired for each event, rather than have a se­nior su­per­in­ten­dent de­cide the num­ber of of­fi­cers present. The cal­cu­la­tor would cal­cu­late the num­ber of po­lice of­fi­cers re­quired based on the num­ber of pa­trons, type of event, lo­ca­tion, and in­ci­dent his­to­ry.

Fire of­fi­cers should no longer be re­quired for the du­ra­tion of events. They should vis­it the venue the day be­fore to do an in­spec­tion.

Ex­tra du­ty should be paid to of­fi­cers via nor­mal chan­nels where PAYE can be ap­plied to their salary. An on­line pay­ment sys­tem should al­so be set up.

There should be a manda­to­ry ID pa­rade by po­lice and fire of­fi­cers for the pro­mot­er be­fore and af­ter the event to avoid the pos­si­bil­i­ty of ghost of­fi­cers at the event.

PATT Pres­i­dent Jerome “Rome” Pre­cil­la be­lieves that the present sys­tem of­ten re­sults in the court grant­i­ng li­cences a few days be­fore or even on the day of the event, mean­ing the pro­mot­er wouldn’t know how the se­nior of­fi­cer would charge for se­cu­ri­ty un­til then.

Pro­mot­er Randy Glas­gow agrees

“You’re do­ing a show and you can’t bud­get for po­lice and fire, so when it comes up to the week of the show, you’re giv­en some crazy fig­ures to deal with. You can’t even ad­just. You ei­ther con­tin­ue with the show and take your loss or try and hope. That’s what it comes down to,” he said.

Glas­gow said he hopes that by No­vem­ber or when Car­ni­val ar­rives, the se­cu­ri­ty arrange­ment charges or is stan­dard­ized.

He be­lieved the is­sues are af­fect­ing the prod­uct of­fered by pro­mot­ers, which in turn af­fects the lo­cal in­dus­try.

“Any­where you go, you don’t have this sit­u­a­tion where you have to pay all this for po­lice and fire. We have to be mind­ful here in Trinidad that we have a prod­uct that the whole world wants to do. There’s rapid growth in the Car­ni­val in­dus­try across the world.

“We have to be care­ful that soon­er or lat­er, we may not be the land of Car­ni­val and events be­cause peo­ple may not choose to come to Trinidad. You may not be able to treat a cus­tomer the way you want to be­cause the high­est per­cent­age of your bud­get is for po­lice and fire.”

Pre­cil­la and Glas­gow called for open, hon­est con­ver­sa­tions among the PATT, the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice, and the Min­istry of Tourism, Cul­ture, and the Arts to find a so­lu­tion.