Mem­bers of the pub­lic are now be­ing ad­vised that they can ex­er­cise while the stay-at-home or­der re­mains in ef­fect.

How­ev­er, Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith is ad­vis­ing against ex­er­cis­ing in groups.

“If one or two per­sons are jog­ging or walk­ing to­geth­er, that is okay,” Grif­fith told Guardian Me­dia dur­ing a walk-through of the Ch­agua­nas Mar­ket yes­ter­day.

Grif­fith, who on­ly re­turned to the field yes­ter­day fol­low­ing a 14-day self-iso­la­tion, said he was par­tic­u­lar­ly con­cerned that the pub­lic con­tin­ued to dis­re­gard so­cial dis­tanc­ing pro­to­cols.

Point­ing to a line of ea­ger con­sumers wait­ing to en­ter the mar­ket, Grif­fith said, “Many in­sti­tu­tions such as mar­kets, banks and su­per­mar­kets are ad­her­ing to so­cial dis­tanc­ing by mak­ing sure a spe­cif­ic num­ber of per­sons will be in­side the fa­cil­i­ty, but the per­sons on the out­side now put them­selves at risk be­cause they all stay con­verged and cramped up.”

He had a few rec­om­men­da­tions for own­ers/op­er­a­tors of busi­ness­es where the pub­lic needs to line up to ac­cess their fa­cil­i­ties.

“If you can’t af­ford or can­not get cones, you can use chalk to draw mark­ers six feet apart so per­sons can use that a guide to move for­ward,” Grif­fith said.

Ad­mit­ting that so­cial dis­tanc­ing pro­to­cols were be­ing re­in­forced in­side but not out­side many places, he said, “It be­comes the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of the busi­ness own­er or the cor­po­ra­tion to do the same. That re­spon­si­bil­i­ty is not just in­side the fa­cil­i­ty, it must be out­side be­cause we can­not have per­sons con­verg­ing in large num­bers like this.”

The CoP ap­pealed to peo­ple to ap­ply a new way of think­ing.

“Any per­son in front or be­hind you could very well be in­fect­ed and if that is the case, would you be so close to the per­son and the an­swer is no,” he said.

Al­though Grif­fith was in self-iso­la­tion fol­low­ing his re­turn from Mi­a­mi two weeks ago, he said he was still heav­i­ly in­volved in plan­ning for the in­creased se­cu­ri­ty mea­sures which will take ef­fect at mid­night to­day.

“The TTPS will now be at the fore­front so we have a lot of work to do. We would be see­ing short­com­ings but we want to as­sure the pub­lic there is not go­ing to be a re­peat of what we saw dur­ing the last state of emer­gency,” he said.

“The TTPS is not go­ing to be high-hand­ed. We are go­ing to op­er­ate with­in our au­thor­i­ty. If reg­u­la­tions have been en­act­ed, we are go­ing to make sure per­sons ad­here to the reg­u­la­tions.”

He en­cour­aged the pub­lic to lis­ten to and fol­low the reg­u­la­tions, as he said the TTPS will not be ex­er­cis­ing the pow­ers of ar­rest un­less ab­solute­ly nec­es­sary. How­ev­er, he warned this was not a free pass for the crim­i­nal el­e­ments to mis­be­have with­out reper­cus­sions.

He ex­plained that as more and more peo­ple are ar­rest­ed/de­tained, there would be a greater pos­si­bil­i­ty that some­one with the virus could en­ter the prison sys­tem and pass it on fur­ther.

Re­fer­ring to the rais­ing of the po­lice alert lev­el from yel­low to or­ange, Grif­fith said this meant that 85 emer­gency re­sponse pa­trol ve­hi­cles were now on the ros­ter as the TTPS in­creased vis­i­bil­i­ty, re­duc­ing the num­ber of of­fi­cers con­duct­ing ad­min­is­tra­tive du­ties and en­sur­ing a se­nior of­fi­cer is in­formed every time some­one is held so a de­tailed analy­sis can be done.