SHAR­LENE RAM­PER­SAD

Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith is call­ing for spe­cial train­ing for all Spe­cial Branch Po­lice of­fi­cers, af­ter he saved one mem­ber of his own se­cu­ri­ty de­tail from drown­ing at Store Bay, To­ba­go, yes­ter­day.

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia, Grif­fith said he and the of­fi­cer were about to board a ves­sel from a dinghy about 100 me­tres from the shore­line when the of­fi­cer slipped and fell in­to the ocean.

“He got in­to dif­fi­cul­ty…he was go­ing down, I was the on­ly per­son on the ves­sel at the time so I was forced to dive in and keep him afloat, it went on for a cou­ple of min­utes and then I was able to get as­sis­tance and get him back on­to the ves­sel,” Grif­fith said.

He said life­guards sta­tioned at Store Bay rushed to ren­der as­sis­tance but by the time they ar­rived, the of­fi­cer was al­ready safe­ly back on­to the dingy.

Grif­fith said nei­ther he nor the of­fi­cer re­quired med­ical treat­ment af­ter the in­ci­dent, but he said he swal­lowed a sig­nif­i­cant amount of sea­wa­ter dur­ing the res­cue.

“I think I in­gest­ed more wa­ter than him be­cause he kept try­ing to push me down while I was try­ing to keep him afloat, which is what usu­al­ly hap­pens when peo­ple are get­ting in­to dif­fi­cul­ty in wa­ter, they start to pan­ic and the per­son who is try­ing to res­cue them, they will try to res­cue them. I think I am pret­ty full drink­ing a lot of salt­wa­ter,” Grif­fith said.

Grif­fith seemed in good spir­its de­spite the in­ci­dent but said it had cast a light on a need for prop­er train­ing for Spe­cial Branch of­fi­cers.

“It has brought to my at­ten­tion that I must en­sure that Spe­cial Branch of­fi­cers, any­one who will se­cure the Prime Min­is­ter, the Pres­i­dent, Chief Jus­tice—or any­one—must have a ba­sic de­gree of train­ing across the board, which in­cludes CPR and be­ing able to swim and how to pro­tect the per­son they are se­cur­ing. To­day, it was the oth­er way around.”

Grif­fith said he was on the is­land to do a check on the ac­tiv­i­ty lev­els at beach­es and en­sure that pub­lic health reg­u­la­tions were be­ing fol­lowed. Sim­i­lar po­lice ac­tion took place at sev­er­al pop­u­lar beach­es in Trinidad yes­ter­day as well.

“It was very calm—I went to vis­it the beach­es and it was just a hand­ful of peo­ple, most of them were able to get a first-hand ‘Bay­watch’ view,” Grif­fith said.