An­na-Lisa Paul

Al­though Trinidad and To­ba­go has record­ed over 530 mur­ders so far and with six weeks left to go be­fore the year ends, act­ing Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Mc Don­ald Ja­cob says the sit­u­a­tion still does not war­rant the im­ple­men­ta­tion of a State of Emer­gency (SoE).

He made the com­ment in re­sponse to ques­tions from re­porters dur­ing the week­ly me­dia brief­ing at the Po­lice Ad­min­is­tra­tion Build­ing, Port-of-Spain, on Thurs­day, as to whether this should be con­sid­ered as a pos­si­ble mech­a­nism to get crime un­der con­trol.

“I don’t think that there is need re­al­ly for us to call a state of emer­gency, but we need to con­tin­ue in a re­lent­less way in deal­ing with the crim­i­nal el­e­ments out there, mak­ing sure we can re­in­force and en­hance most of our strate­gies and tac­tics to make the place safe.”

He added: “If we reach that point and we don’t want to reach that point at all that we have to call a State of Emer­gency…that is be­yond my call. I can on­ly make a rec­om­men­da­tion as the per­son in charge of the Po­lice Ser­vice, but from where I sit at this stage, I don’t think it is nec­es­sary.”

Seek­ing to re­as­sure the pub­lic that po­lice of­fi­cers are work­ing hard to re­duce crime, he said at least 100 search­es and 160 ex­er­cis­es are done per week across T&T.

He said a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the 625 il­le­gal firearms re­cov­ered for the year so far had been seized dur­ing road­block ex­er­cis­es.

Hav­ing ar­rest­ed and charged 1,023 sus­pects for firearm-re­lat­ed of­fences since the start of 2022, Ja­cob said gen­uine ef­forts by the TTPS had re­sult­ed in 106 high-pow­ered ri­fles be­ing seized from crim­i­nal hands.

Mean­while, he un­der­scored the gen­uine ef­forts by oth­er au­thor­i­ties, “to clog that leak in re­la­tion to il­le­gal firearms be­ing im­port­ed in­to T&T.”

Point­ing to the join­ing of re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al bod­ies in the fight to stem the flow of il­le­gal firearms across the Caribbean, Ja­cob said oth­er is­lands were al­so ex­pe­ri­enc­ing sim­i­lar crime-re­lat­ed is­sues as T&T.