PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Al­most every four days, a po­lice of­fi­cer in Trinidad and To­ba­go has been shot at in the last five years.

This was ac­cord­ing to Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Gary Grif­fith as he re­spond­ed to crit­i­cisms of the po­lice amid re­cent claims of ex­tra-ju­di­cial killings.

“In the last five years, there have been 527 oc­ca­sions where po­lice have been shot at in the last 60 months. You’re speak­ing about less than every four days, a po­lice of­fi­cer is shot at. But that is not a con­cern ap­par­ent­ly. Or that over 5,000 cit­i­zens have been killed in the last 12 years, not by po­lice of­fi­cers.”

Grif­fith al­so ques­tioned claims that po­lice had killed a man in Cara­po al­though no ev­i­dence had been pre­sent­ed that po­lice had been in­volved.

“Not one per­son has sent video footage, not one per­son has a pho­to­graph. Not one per­son knows the li­cense plate of the ve­hi­cle but they claim that every­one, that many peo­ple were there and every­one knew it was po­lice. They said that the in­di­vid­u­als who saw the in­ci­dent of the killing in Cara­po, the rea­son why they knew it was po­lice was be­cause they look like po­lice,” he said.

Grif­fith al­so re­spond­ed to the Move­ment for So­cial Jus­tice’s call for body cam­eras to be used, as he clar­i­fied that body cam­eras had in­deed been in use by po­lice, with about 180 cam­eras cur­rent­ly be­ing utilised.

How­ev­er, the Com­mis­sion­er and Po­lice Strate­gic Ad­vis­er Dwight An­drews again high­light­ed that body cam­eras still had lim­its with re­gard to its use.

He said be­cause of the lim­i­ta­tions he pushed for the use of live video footage from pa­trol cars.

“The po­lice ve­hi­cles the emer­gency po­lice ve­hi­cles there are 100 cam­eras that are ac­tu­al­ly on the ve­hi­cles and the rea­son I want to men­tion this, is that this ac­tu­al­ly pro­vides a greater de­gree of in­for­ma­tion be­ing passed on to the pub­lic.”

Dur­ing the press con­fer­ence po­lice un­veiled a brand new on­line crime re­port­ing plat­form, which they hope would re­duce con­cerns over leaked re­ports and in­crease con­fi­dence in re­port­ing crimes to the po­lice.