Gold Com­man­der of the State of Emer­gency (SoE), Deputy Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Suzette Mar­tin, says the num­ber of peo­ple de­tained so far un­der this SoE has al­ready sur­passed the num­ber ar­rest­ed dur­ing the en­tire­ty of last SoE.

Days af­ter a Pre­ven­ta­tive De­ten­tion Or­der (PDO) was is­sued for a Guapo teenag­er for firearm of­fences and sus­pect­ed gang af­fil­i­a­tion, Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Al­lis­ter Gue­var­ro says he is par­tic­u­lar­ly con­cerned by the in­volve­ment of chil­dren in se­ri­ous crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty.

Thir­teen more de­ten­tion or­ders have been is­sued un­der reg­u­la­tion 14 of the Emer­gency Pow­ers Reg­u­la­tions, 2026, in­clud­ing one for a de­tainee who as­sist­ed a cor­rupt mem­ber of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice in in­ter­fer­ing with ev­i­dence linked to a transna­tion­al or­gan­ised crime group.

Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Al­lis­ter Gue­var­ro is urg­ing ap­pli­cants for firearm user’s li­cences (FULs) to be pa­tient as the nec­es­sary back­ground checks, in­ves­ti­ga­tions and process­es are com­plet­ed, not­ing that while they are free to ap­ply for a per­mit, they are not en­ti­tled to au­to­mat­i­cal­ly re­ceive one.