Rhon­dor Dowlat-Ros­tant

Act­ing Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Mc­Don­ald Ja­cob has cleared the air on al­le­ga­tions made by for­mer min­is­ter of agri­cul­ture Clarence Ramb­harat that he has a file in the Po­lice Ser­vice, where he (Ramb­harat)re­port­ed that a se­nior of­fi­cial in the min­istry worked with a se­nior of­fi­cer in State Lands to grant five rel­a­tives of the se­nior of­fi­cer sev­en lots of state lands val­ued at a min­i­mum $5 mil­lion.

Speak­ing dur­ing a me­dia brief­ing launch­ing the new Na­tion­al Op­er­a­tions Task Force on Thurs­day, Ja­cob said two peo­ple were ar­rest­ed and tak­en be­fore the court. He said he has a let­ter from Ramb­harat thank­ing the TTPS for the way the in­ves­ti­ga­tion was done.

“There are al­so oth­er in­ves­ti­ga­tions on­go­ing but two al­ready charged and brought be­fore the courts,” Ja­cob said dur­ing the launch at the In­ter-Agency Task Force head­quar­ters in Aranguez.

Asked about the Firearms Sec­tion and whether its op­er­a­tions, in­clud­ing the is­su­ing of firearm users li­cens­es, were still halt­ed, Ja­cob said two weeks ago he start­ed re­view­ing doc­u­ments and sign­ing off on them, es­ti­mat­ing he may have com­plet­ed over 250 doc­u­ments, in­clud­ing pro­vi­sion­als and im­port. He said the ac­tu­al de­part­ment is not shut down.

“There is, in fact, op­er­a­tions tak­ing place to deal with a se­ries of out­stand­ing and pro­vi­sion­al per­mits, vari­a­tions and et cetera, from the lat­ter part of last year and we dis­cov­ered there were a lot of ap­pli­ca­tions which were not processed. About 2,000. And it have per­sons work­ing on it right now,” Ja­cob said.

“So we felt it would not be wise to to­tal­ly open up for new ap­pli­ca­tions at this time, as the teams are deal­ing with the out­stand­ing mat­ters.

“There are sev­er­al per­sons with­in the last two weeks (who) have been en­gaged by that sec­tion and have re­ceived a pro­vi­sion­al per­mit and vari­a­tions. So work is al­so go­ing on. But al­so be re­mind­ed there is a crim­i­nal in­ves­ti­ga­tion go­ing on to that as­pect of the Firearm Sec­tion and al­so an au­dit that is go­ing on.

“So these things are why we felt it would be un­nec­es­sary to open up to new ap­pli­ca­tions just yet.”

Ja­cob said he had a meet­ing on Wednes­day with the team of peo­ple do­ing the au­dit.

He said, “We had a three months plan and we have about six months to go, but we are al­ready see­ing there may be need to ex­tend for some ad­di­tion­al time, but at the end of this month we will be in a bet­ter po­si­tion to say how much more time will be need­ed to com­plete the au­dit.”

Mean­while, Ja­cob said for the year so far, the Po­lice Ser­vice had seized ap­prox­i­mate­ly 142 firearms, 24 of which are high-pow­ered.

Apart from launch­ing the new Na­tion­al Op­er­a­tions Task Force (NOTF), Ja­cob al­so launched the Mul­ti-Agency Firearm Re­trieval Ini­tia­tive.

He said last year, the TTPS seized 680 guns, over 50 of which were high-pow­ered weapons. He added that this pro­gramme has al­ready been test­ed dur­ing the ear­ly part of this year.

“Work­ing with the agen­cies as we launch this pro­gramme and in so do­ing, we have re­cov­ered 142 firearms. And out of 108 mur­ders for the year so far, 94 were in­volv­ing the use of firearms,” he added.

The sta­tis­tics, he said, are a clear in­di­ca­tion that there’s a “se­ri­ous is­sue with the use of firearms and it is caus­ing mur­der and oth­er se­ri­ous in­juries to our cit­i­zens.”

“So it is nec­es­sary that all the agen­cies come to­geth­er and work to­geth­er to deal with this par­tic­u­lar ini­tia­tive,” he said.

He al­so dis­closed that the TTPS has ar­rest­ed 226 peo­ple and charged them for var­i­ous firearm of­fences, in­clud­ing shoot­ing and wound­ing, and pos­ses­sion.

“Yet the scourge con­tin­ues. So I think we can all un­der­stand and ap­pre­ci­ate why we need to take this joint ap­proach be­cause it is af­fect­ing every one of us and all the var­i­ous de­part­ments. So this ef­fort, we will im­pact sig­nif­i­cant­ly deal­ing with the as­pect of and seizure of firearms in T&T,” Ja­cob said.