Renu­ka Singh

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.”