Jesse Ramdeo

The fa­ther of two young boys who were caught in the melee when po­lice de­ployed tear gas against a crowd of pro­test­ers at the Queen’s Park Sa­van­nah, Port-of-Spain, on Sun­day is an­gry and in­sist­ing there was no need for the of­fi­cers to use such force.

How­ev­er, Casper Daniel ad­mit­ted yes­ter­day he was try­ing to get away from the scene with his boys af­ter re­al­is­ing things were es­ca­lat­ing fol­low­ing the of­fi­cial event. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, he said the windy con­di­tions saw the chem­i­cals still blow­ing to­wards his group.

He said, “We saw what was tak­ing place so we de­cid­ed to cross the road and went along TGIF side there be­cause it was away from com­mo­tion.”

Short­ly af­ter po­lice de­ployed tear gas to dis­perse a crowd of pro­test­ers, the two young boys were cap­tured on video get­ting their eyes flushed out with wa­ter by an adult. Tear gas, a col­lec­tion of chem­i­cals, is known to cause eye, skin and res­pi­ra­to­ry ir­ri­ta­tion.

The video record­ing fu­elled claims of abuse of pow­er by po­lice, an al­le­ga­tion Daniel was in agree­ment with yes­ter­day.

“It was ex­ces­sive force used on the pop­u­la­tion when it didn’t have to be that way,” Daniel told Guardian Me­dia.

Daniel con­firmed he, his wife and two sons were par­tic­i­pat­ing in a prayer march led by the head of the First Wave Move­ment, Umar Ab­dul­lah.

But Daniel said he did not ex­pect things to es­ca­late the way they did.

“The po­lice, in their ri­ot gear, formed a line and they start­ed head­ing to­wards the crowd and the cars and things that were there and while pro­gress­ing to­wards the cars, they start telling peo­ple they have to move. They then formed a line from the op­po­site di­rec­tion, so as fast as they moved for­ward the crowd will move back just not to have fric­tion be­tween the po­lice and civil­ians.”

Daniel said on see­ing the com­mo­tion, he and his fam­i­ly sep­a­rat­ed from the crowd but the po­lice dis­charged the tear gas and the dis­tance be­tween them quick­ly short­ened.

“When the breeze blow, the smoke ac­tu­al­ly reach by where we were, so they couldn’t breathe and couldn’t see so they start­ed pan­ick­ing. We had to pick them up and run down the road and try to flag down cars to see if we could get wa­ter to help wash out their eyes. Luck­i­ly, the boys had no dam­age to their eye sight, they just had prob­lems breath­ing for a while, they couldn’t see so we had to com­fort them, lift them up and cud­dle and treat them like a ba­by.”

While trau­ma­tised on Sun­day, the boys were good enough to at­tend on­line class­es yes­ter­day.

The Push Back protest was aimed at high­light­ing con­cerns over Gov­ern­ment’s vac­ci­na­tion pol­i­cy for pub­lic ser­vant and its han­dling of COVID-19. Se­nior of­fi­cers claimed the crowd be­came un­ruly, forc­ing them to take ac­tion. A to­tal of 12 peo­ple were de­tained dur­ing the protest but up to yes­ter­day on­ly one of them had been charged.

Yes­ter­day, how­ev­er, act­ing Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Mc­Don­ald Ja­cob again de­fend­ed the of­fi­cers’ ac­tions on the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice’s Be­yond the Tape pro­gramme on TV6. Re­it­er­at­ing that the march was il­le­gal, since the or­gan­is­ers did not have per­mis­sion from him to con­duct the ac­tiv­i­ty, Ja­cob said the Guard and Emer­gency Branch head re­port­ed to him that the of­fi­cers gave the pro­test­ers nu­mer­ous warn­ings to dis­burse af­ter the ac­tiv­i­ty had end­ed be­fore fir­ing the tear gas. He de­nied the of­fi­cers act­ed in a high-hand­ed man­ner.

“The po­lice fol­lowed our use of force pol­i­cy as re­quired, they use all the ex­pres­sion, they made all the ef­forts to dis­perse the crowds and even though the crowds had dis­persed at some point, a core group of per­sons in­sist­ed that they were not mov­ing and the of­fi­cers did what was re­quired ac­cord­ing to our stan­dard op­er­a­tional pro­ce­dures and they are prop­er­ly trained and they fol­lowed all the train­ing and meth­ods that they have learned in or­der to deal with the crowd con­trol and in those par­tic­u­lar cir­cum­stances.”

He al­so in­di­cat­ed that the of­fi­cers op­er­at­ed well with­in the TTPS’ use of force pol­i­cy and did not need his per­mis­sion to de­ploy the tear gas, as had been sug­gest­ed by cer­tain seg­ment of the pub­lic yes­ter­day.

Ja­cob al­so scoffed at the sug­ges­tion that the po­lice’s ac­tion was po­lit­i­cal­ly sanc­tioned.

“I’m stunned, you re­alise I am stay­ing a while to re­spond be­cause I just can­not un­der­stand where that is com­ing from. Where is the pol­i­tics in it where per­sons chose to find some cracks with­in the law and try to do an il­le­gal ac­tiv­i­ties and po­lice went abut tak­ing the rel­e­vant ac­tion, what is po­lit­i­cal in re­la­tion to that? Prob­a­bly they op­er­a­tionalise or un­der­stand po­lit­i­cal dif­fer­ent­ly to the con­ven­tion­al un­der­stand­ing.”

Ja­cob and pro­gramme host, SORT head Roger Alexan­der, al­so sug­gest­ed that the is­sue of chil­dren be­ing tak­en to such pro­tect ac­tions should al­so be looked at by the Chil­dren’s Au­thor­i­ty and the TTPS’ Child Pro­tec­tion Unit.

How­ev­er, the use of tear gas raised ques­tions of dif­fer­ent strokes for dif­fer­ent folks yes­ter­day from for­mer top cop Gary Grif­fith, who said on his watch, tear gas would not have been de­ployed.

Speak­ing on CNC3’s The Morn­ing Brew yes­ter­day, he said, “How is it when you had a sit­u­a­tion just a week ago with the Beetham res­i­dents when they were ac­tu­al­ly do­ing some­thing that would have in­con­ve­nienced over 100,000 peo­ple, there was no need for tear gas, you have to be very care­ful. It is not a straight case of say­ing you broke the law...I as a po­lice com­mis­sion­er would have been there, you have to be on the ground to make a de­ci­sion like that.”