The Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice has a long record of in­ves­ti­gat­ing and pros­e­cut­ing po­lice of­fi­cers who are ac­cused of killing cit­i­zens un­law­ful­ly on the job, ac­cord­ing to Act­ing Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Mc­Don­ald Ja­cob.

Ja­cob made the com­ment at a TTPS press brief­ing yes­ter­day, af­ter be­ing asked by Guardian Me­dia if the pub­lic can trust the TTPS to in­ves­ti­gate po­lice shoot­ings fair­ly, giv­en the cir­cum­stances be­hind the in­ves­ti­ga­tions in­to the 2020 Mor­vant shoot­ings and the April 22 killing of Po­lice Con­sta­ble Clarence Gilkes.

The fa­tal Mor­vant shoot­ings and PC Gilkes in­ves­ti­ga­tions took ma­jor turns af­ter cru­cial pieces of in­for­ma­tion and ev­i­dence were leaked in­to the pub­lic do­main, which re­port­ed­ly con­tra­dict­ed ini­tial po­si­tions.

“You’ll see on so many oc­ca­sions that the po­lice con­duct the in­ves­ti­ga­tion and, in fact, charge per­sons with­out all those col­lat­er­al sup­port that you are talk­ing about. We stand tall in re­la­tion to do­ing our in­ves­ti­ga­tions.” Ja­cob said.

“We can go back in his­to­ry to show on so many oc­ca­sions where we had sit­u­a­tions where long ago, it didn’t have CCTV and it had so many in­stances where we had in­ves­ti­ga­tions and po­lice of­fi­cers were charged for var­i­ous of­fences and we didn’t have those sit­u­a­tions.”

Asked if he could re­call the last time the TTPS charged its of­fi­cers for killing cit­i­zens un­law­ful­ly while on du­ty, he said there were sev­er­al in­ci­dents in re­cent mem­o­ry.

“The one that comes to me im­me­di­ate­ly is an in­ci­dent that oc­curred in St Mary’s Vil­lage in Princes Town some years ago and where how many po­lice of­fi­cers were charged in that in­ci­dent…about sev­en?” Ja­cob said.

Sev­en of­fi­cers were ini­tial­ly charged for the mur­ders of three civil­ians in Moru­ga in 2011, but one was even­tu­al­ly grant­ed im­mu­ni­ty in ex­change for her tes­ti­mo­ny.

Ja­cob added, “You have the PCA, who al­so plays an im­por­tant part in look­ing over all in­ves­ti­ga­tions.”

The act­ing com­mis­sion­er was then asked if he be­lieved the pub­lic has full trust in the TTPS’ abil­i­ty to in­ves­ti­gate po­lice shoot­ings fair­ly.

“I can­not an­swer that un­less prop­er re­search is done by us­ing prop­er re­search meth­ods and not the so­cial me­dia meth­ods to de­cide whether or not the pub­lic will have the nec­es­sary trust in us.”

With re­spect to the use of po­lice body cam­eras, Ja­cob sought to as­sure the pub­lic that by the end of Au­gust, all 1,120 cam­eras will be dis­trib­uted through­out T&T.

He said, to date, they’ve dis­trib­uted 558 cam­eras.

Last March, 1,000 body cam­eras were ac­quired by the TTPS through the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty.

Ac­cord­ing to po­lice sources, the cam­eras cost around $1 mil­lion.