The plan to give spe­cial­ly se­lect­ed mem­bers of the De­fence Force the pow­ers of ar­rest, search and seizure now re­strict­ed to po­lice of­fi­cers is the lat­est stop-gap mea­sure aimed at ad­dress­ing the coun­try's dead­ly crime prob­lem.The move to beef up the pow­ers of sol­diers comes as T&T's se­cu­ri­ty ap­pa­ra­tus strug­gles to deal with a spi­ralling mur­der wave, which has seen an es­ti­mat­ed 81 killings in the 59 days of 2013.

At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan said in a state­ment that there was an ur­gent need "to for­malise through leg­is­la­tion the role and func­tions of mem­bers of the De­fence Force when ren­der­ing aid to the Po­lice Ser­vice."As sol­diers have as­sist­ed the po­lice dur­ing pre­vi­ous up­surges in crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty, it is ob­vi­ous­ly ap­pro­pri­ate that they should be cov­ered by the "le­gal frame­work" that al­lows them to ex­er­cise the same rights, priv­i­leges and im­mu­ni­ties as po­lice of­fi­cers.

But the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al's state­ment sug­gests an ex­pan­sion of the role of the De­fence Force in a way that needs to be sub­ject to a great deal more con­sul­ta­tion and con­sen­sus-build­ing than has been the case.One ob­vi­ous area of con­cern is whether the leg­is­la­tion laid in the Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day pro­vides the pub­lic with an av­enue for re­dress if mem­bers of the De­fence Force over­step their re­mit.

If sol­diers have the "rights, priv­i­leges and im­mu­ni­ties" of the po­lice, it would seem ap­pro­pri­ate that the pub­lic be giv­en the op­por­tu­ni­ty to lodge com­plaints to an in­de­pen­dent statu­to­ry body sim­i­lar to the Po­lice Com­plaints Au­thor­i­ty, or for the ex­ten­sion of the man­date of the ex­ist­ing PCA to in­clude sol­diers.There are sev­er­al un­re­solved cas­es in which mem­bers of the pub­lic have ac­cused sol­diers of abuse of pow­er.

The At­tor­ney Gen­er­al and the Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty al­so pledged that the Gov­ern­ment would have De­fence Force per­son­nel trained for their new du­ties to en­sure that they are prop­er­ly equipped to work along­side po­lice of­fi­cers.Apart from the ob­vi­ous con­cerns about the train­ing syl­labus and whether sol­diers who fail will be de­barred from do­ing po­lice work, the fact is that the ori­en­ta­tion of a sol­dier is very dif­fer­ent to that of a po­lice­man.

Sol­diers are trained to kill. But what is need­ed is a larg­er con­tin­gent of de­tec­tives and of­fi­cials trained in foren­sics and bal­lis­tics so that po­lice are able to per­ceive crime pat­terns and solve mur­der cas­es, which would lead to an in­crease in ar­rests.Third­ly, there are con­cerns about whether the sol­diers grant­ed po­lice pow­ers will car­ry out their du­ties across the board, tar­get­ing the cap­i­tal­ists of crime wher­ev­er they live, rather than kick­ing down the doors of the foot sol­diers in the tra­di­tion­al crime hotspots.

Fourth­ly, if sol­diers are in­volved in polic­ing, would that mean there are few­er sol­diers avail­able to re­spond to ex­ter­nal threats that may arise in the fu­ture?In­deed, there are ques­tions that need to be an­swered about the suit­abil­i­ty of hav­ing dual-role law-en­force­ment of­fi­cers and whether such of­fi­cers would be ef­fec­tive in ei­ther role.

The Gov­ern­ment has a great deal of ex­plain­ing to do about this move and there is no way that the nec­es­sary leg­is­la­tion should be ap­proved un­less there are ex­treme­ly rig­or­ous con­trols in place that ad­dress the ac­count­abil­i­ty of these new "po­lice­men."