Jesse Ramdeo

In the face of con­tin­u­ous car­jack­ings re­port­ed by the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice, the own­er of a GPS in­stal­la­tion busi­ness has lament­ed that ve­hi­cle own­ers tend to pri­ori­tise aes­thet­ics over safe­ty.

Dur­ing an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Baari Gaf­far said while mo­bile units have grown in pop­u­lar­i­ty over the years, mo­torists are still not putting safe­ty first.

“There are still many peo­ple who do not put GPS and it’s a mat­ter of them not hav­ing it as a high pri­or­i­ty be­cause they’d say ‘na that won’t hap­pen to me’,” Gaf­far said.

Eleven years ago, Gaf­far and his fam­i­ly were robbed fol­low­ing a trip to the beach. The ex­pe­ri­ence even­tu­al­ly be­came the cat­a­lyst for him to en­ter the an­ti-theft in­dus­try.

“Our com­pa­ny has been op­er­a­tional since 2012, so this year will be our eleventh year. What caused me to start the GPS busi­ness was while va­ca­tion­ing with my fam­i­ly and fol­low­ing a trip to the beach, our car was bro­ken in­to and the ban­dits stole every­thing. They were try­ing to steal the ve­hi­cle as well but they were un­suc­cess­ful and I want­ed to come up with a way to pre­vent that from hap­pen­ing,” he said.

Gaf­far not­ed that while many peo­ple aren’t dri­ven to in­stall an­ti-theft de­vices in their ve­hi­cles and seem to be stuck in gear, thieves are in over­drive.

“There is a vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty on cer­tain ve­hi­cles, in­clud­ing the Aqua, Ti­i­da, Axio and Field­er. Pri­mar­i­ly, it is the key start mod­els that are be­ing tar­get­ed. They will go to the quar­ter pan­el in the back glass of the back door, not the main win­dow, the one be­hind, smash that, open the back door, get en­trance in­to the ve­hi­cle, get to the front door, then the ig­ni­tion cylin­der where you put your key, they smash that and ei­ther use a flat head screw dri­ver or a bird beak, and start the ve­hi­cle.”

On Thurs­day, the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice re­vealed that ban­dits were now broad­en­ing their ve­hic­u­lar tar­get list to in­clude Hon­da City ve­hi­cles and Kia and Hyundai pick-ups. TTPS me­dia am­bas­sador, ag ASP Ra­jesh Lal, urged ve­hi­cle own­ers to in­stall GPS de­vices, es­pe­cial­ly as prices for the gad­get had dropped over the years.

Ac­cord­ing to Gaf­far, while prices of the an­ti-theft sys­tems vary, mem­bers of the pub­lic can get a three-year-long ser­vice for less than $3,000.

“It is not just hard­ware you’re pur­chas­ing, you’re pur­chas­ing af­ter-sale ser­vices for some­one to en­sure the sys­tem is op­er­a­tional. You try to take away the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty from the own­er, who have so much go­ing on in their lives be­cause there are ser­vices such as 24- hours mon­i­tor­ing, 24-hour call cen­tres, in the event of emer­gen­cies, there are peo­ple ready to re­spond and act on it.

Gaf­far said there were al­so added pro­tec­tion fea­tures if ban­dits force ve­hi­cle own­ers to re­veal the lo­ca­tion of GPS de­vices.

“In the event you are held up and they ask where is the GPS, we have mea­sures in place for you to give ap­pro­pri­ate an­swers and we can still have coun­ter­mea­sures in place to get back your ve­hi­cle.”

Gaf­far ad­vised that as car­jack­ings con­tin­ue, peo­ple should steer to­wards an­ti-theft de­vices.