SHAS­TRI BOODAN

“Keep the guns com­ing!” is the sen­ti­ment ex­pressed by Richie Sookhai, pres­i­dent of the Ch­agua­nas Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce (CCIC).

At the time, Sookhai was speak­ing at the Freeport Po­lice Sta­tion as the Cham­ber do­nat­ed a $10,000 drone to the Po­lice Ser­vice, on Mon­day No­vem­ber 8th.

Sookhai said gov­ern­ment should not regress in­to a sys­tem of ex­treme bu­reau­cra­cy for busi­ness­men to ac­quire le­gal firearms. He said be­fore Gary Grif­fith was ap­point­ed Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice, there was a lot of red tape when it came to get­ting a firearm li­cense.

“You can’t tell me it’s eas­i­er to ac­cess an il­le­gal firearm when it should be easy to ac­cess a le­gal firearm through the ap­pro­pri­ate chan­nels,” Sookhai said.

Re­fer­ring to Grif­fith, the Cham­ber pres­i­dent not­ed: “We saw dur­ing his tenure that ap­pli­cants were able to ac­cess their firearm li­cense in record time com­pared to the past com­mis­sion­ers.  We are hop­ing that this trend con­tin­ues. We would like to know that due dili­gence is done for each ap­pli­cant, so that each ap­pli­cant who is re­ceiv­ing the firearms li­cense is a re­spon­si­ble per­son who can pro­tect not on­ly them­selves but al­so oth­er in­di­vid­u­als and their sur­round­ings.”

“The crim­i­nal el­e­ments are ac­cess­ing firearms eas­i­ly be­cause T&T is a huge tran­ship­ment point and it seems that we are not able to curb the im­por­ta­tion of il­le­gal firearms as we would like to.  How­ev­er, the cit­i­zens need to pro­tect them­selves. We are hop­ing that the new com­mis­sion­er would be able to con­tin­ue the work and process ap­pli­cants in the fu­ture,” he added.

Sookhai said he ex­pects the crime rate to in­crease as soon as the state of emer­gency con­cludes at the end of No­vem­ber:

“A lot of peo­ple have been with­out jobs, and we will ex­pect a spike in crime.  You know what goes on in the Cen­tral area around Christ­mas time.”

Sookhai said the Cham­ber was hap­py to pro­vide the po­lice with the drone, and promised the Cen­tral Di­vi­sion more drones. He called on the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty to work with the po­lice to cul­ti­vate a safe en­vi­ron­ment.

Act­ing Se­nior Su­per­in­ten­dent Curt Si­mon said the drone would be used for in­tel­li­gence gath­er­ing in the Cen­tral Di­vi­sion, es­pe­cial­ly to tack­le white col­lar crimes. Si­mon said there al­ready are of­fi­cers who are trained to use the drones and re­vealed that five more po­lice­men would be trained.