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Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Griffith to ‘armchair’ roadlock critics

by

Renuka SIngh
1916 days ago
20200423
SORT officers during last week’s roadblock exercise along the Churchill Roosevelt Highway in Barataria.

SORT officers during last week’s roadblock exercise along the Churchill Roosevelt Highway in Barataria.

SHIRLEY BAHADUR

Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Gary Grif­fith last night rub­bished the opin­ion of “arm­chair ex­perts” bent on crit­i­cis­ing the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice for their ac­tion in road­blocks dur­ing the COVID-19 Stay-at-Home mea­sure.

Dur­ing an in­ter­view dur­ing the CNC3 news­cast, Grif­fith blast­ed crim­i­nol­o­gist Pro­fes­sor Ramesh De­osaran “and oth­ers” whom he said did not know any­thing about re­al law en­force­ment.

Grif­fith’s ire comes in the wake of con­stant crit­i­cism of the TTPS for cre­at­ing hours of traf­fic grid­lock due to the road­block ex­er­cis­es and send­ing cit­i­zens back home if their trips were not con­sid­ered es­sen­tial al­though the po­lice did not have the le­gal pow­er to do so.

Asked whether there was a gap be­tween what the leg­is­la­tion al­lowed and what was ac­tu­al­ly en­force­able last night, Grif­fith said, “There is no gap. The fact is the per­sons you spoke to are not ex­perts. This con­tin­ues to be the prob­lem here, every­one is an arm­chair crit­ic, who have ab­solute­ly no knowl­edge of law en­force­ment.”

While the news­cast had opin­ions from De­osaran, at­tor­ney Mar­tin Daly and Dean of Law at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies Rose-Marie Belle An­toine, Grif­fith seemed to sin­gle out De­osaran. (See Page 9)

“Pro­fes­sor De­osaran knows noth­ing about law en­force­ment. His job is to un­der­stand the cause of crime, so what they con­tin­ue to do is to give the im­pres­sion that they are law en­force­ment ex­perts. They do not know the dif­fer­ence be­tween a ba­ton and a bul­let,” he said.

On Thurs­day, for­mer at­tor­ney gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan took to so­cial me­dia to tell cit­i­zens that the po­lice had no au­thor­i­ty to force any­one to go back home and not go about their busi­ness dur­ing the Stay-at-Home mea­sures.

“We see at­tor­neys as well try­ing to do the same thing. I can ex­plain, our po­lice of­fi­cers are to­tal­ly well trained in to­tal con­trast to these false, mis­lead­ing and mis­chie­vous com­ments by Pro­fes­sor De­osaran and oth­ers,” Grif­fith said.

Grif­fith said that he nev­er con­fused the dif­fer­ence be­tween what was the law and what need­ed per­sua­sion. He said from day one he had ac­knowl­edged there was no law to pre­vent any­one from go­ing out­doors.

“Now we have every­one jump­ing on the band­wag­on. All we are do­ing is try­ing to use per­sua­sion, we can­not po­lice stu­pid­i­ty, there is a law of com­mon sense,” Grif­fith said, not­ing cit­i­zens must be aware that leav­ing their homes puts them at risk of con­tract­ing the virus.

He said all the po­lice can en­force is what has been put in the Pub­lic Health Or­di­nance and those reg­u­la­tions per­tain­ing to as­sem­bly, stores that can and can­not be opened.

“Those are the things, noth­ing has changed,” he said.

“What we are see­ing is poor lead­er­ship where per­sons are de­mand­ing, guid­ing and rep­re­sent­ing cit­i­zens via in­sist­ing that it’s their right to do wrong.”

COVID-19


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