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Friday, July 11, 2025

Hinds to get crime-fighting wishlist from CoP

by

Anna-Lisa Paul
809 days ago
20230423
National Security Minister Fitzgerald Hinds addresses Aranguez residents during an emergency meeting at the Aranguez Community Centre, yesterday.

National Security Minister Fitzgerald Hinds addresses Aranguez residents during an emergency meeting at the Aranguez Community Centre, yesterday.

ABRAHAM DIAZ

The Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil (NSC) is trou­bled by the es­ca­lat­ing crime sit­u­a­tion and while they have ac­knowl­edged the fear that cit­i­zens are ex­pe­ri­enc­ing over it, Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Fitzger­ald Hinds has as­sured that steps have been tak­en to strength­en re­sources avail­able to law en­force­ment of­fi­cers to im­prove se­cu­ri­ty op­er­a­tions.

Dis­clos­ing this as he ad­dressed res­i­dents dur­ing an emer­gency meet­ing at the Aranguez Com­mu­ni­ty Cen­tre yes­ter­day, Hinds said he had been man­dat­ed by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley, as head of the NSC, to look deep­er in­to the oc­cur­rences of the spate of home in­va­sions which oc­curred over the East­er week­end.

Six ban­dits in­vad­ed Rasheed Ghany’s home at Ram­lal Trace Ex­ten­sion, Aranguez, on April 16, and ter­rorised and bru­talised the fam­i­ly for 15 min­utes be­fore rob­bing them of cash, valu­ables and al­co­hol.

In that in­stance, a va­ca­tion­ing po­lice of­fi­cer who lives in the area and is part of the neigh­bour­hood What’s App group, re­spond­ed to the call for help and was suc­cess­ful in killing one man and as­sist­ing in the ap­pre­hen­sion of five oth­ers.

An el­der­ly cou­ple at Be­jue­cal, Cunu­pia, were al­so tied up, beat­en and robbed at their home that very week­end.

Ad­mit­ting the oc­cur­rences had trou­bled both him and the PM, Hinds yes­ter­day said he had met with Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Er­la Hare­wood-Christo­pher and the Chief of De­fence Staff last week with re­spect to the wor­ri­some de­vel­op­ments.

“We are not po­lice, the Prime Min­is­ter and I, but we have a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to this coun­try,” Hinds said.

“The po­lice has the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to man­age the crime sit­u­a­tion in those ways, so we lis­tened to what the Com­mis­sion­er, on be­half of the po­lice, had to say and we lis­tened to what the Chief of De­fence Staff had to say be­cause the De­fence Force has been play­ing a sig­nal role in deal­ing with law en­force­ment for sev­er­al years in T&T.”

Hinds said both those heads had re­quest­ed ac­cess to more ve­hi­cles.

He said Gov­ern­ment was work­ing to sup­ply ad­di­tion­al re­sources to law en­force­ment.

“We pro­vide ve­hi­cles and we pro­vide re­sources on an on­go­ing ba­sis...as long as the po­lice ser­vice ex­ists, as long as the fire ser­vice ex­ists, the De­fence Force, all the agen­cies, they need re­sources to re­pair, to get new ones. It’s a work al­ways hap­pen­ing.

“So in this con­text, they want­ed some more ve­hi­cles and the Prime Min­is­ter man­dat­ed me as his Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty to en­sure that that is done.”

Hinds said he is ex­pect­ing feed­back from both law en­force­ment heads by to­day.

Lis­ten­ing in­tent­ly to the con­cerns by res­i­dents, who spoke of be­ing un­able to ven­ture out late at night or sim­ply en­joy time in their home gar­den and in­stead be­ing forced to bar­ri­cade them­selves in to try and avoid be­com­ing tar­gets, Hinds urged the res­i­dents to co­op­er­ate with the au­thor­i­ties, as they are work­ing to im­prove the sit­u­a­tion.

Ad­dress­ing al­le­ga­tions that res­i­dents were al­so afraid to trust the po­lice and re­port il­lic­it ac­tiv­i­ties due to fear of cor­rupt of­fi­cers, for­mer head of the North East­ern Di­vi­sion, ACP Win­ston Ma­haraj, ad­vised them to utilise the 555 or 800-TIPS op­tions, which he claimed were pri­vate and con­fi­den­tial.

The pan­el of speak­ers ap­plaud­ed of­fers by sev­er­al res­i­dents to as­sist with the fi­nan­cial costs that would be in­curred in or­der to in­stall se­cu­ri­ty cam­eras along all streets in the com­mu­ni­ty, as well of­fers of tech­ni­cal ex­per­tise in set­ting up the nec­es­sary se­cu­ri­ty ap­pa­ra­tus.


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