Akash Sama­roo

The Gov­ern­ment will soon have the au­thor­i­ty to forcibly re­move street dwellers.

The Min­istry of So­cial De­vel­op­ment and Fam­i­ly Ser­vices told a Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee (JSC) of Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day that it is work­ing on leg­is­la­tion that will give it­self and the Po­lice the le­gal back­ing to in­vol­un­tar­i­ly re­move the so­cial­ly dis­placed.

“We have com­plet­ed our pol­i­cy doc­u­ment, we have set up our own in­ter­nal re­view com­mit­tee, we have start­ed to en­gage key agen­cies so we’re of the view that it can be com­plet­ed in fis­cal 2022,” said Jacque­line John­son, the Min­istry’s Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary.

John­son said while there is cur­rent leg­is­la­tion that deals with street dwellers - the So­cial­ly Dis­placed Per­sons Act of 2000 - it was nev­er pro­claimed and it al­so did not al­low for the in­vol­un­tary re­moval of street dwellers.

“We have to de­pend on the vol­un­tary sys­tem where we go out on the streets and ask peo­ple to come to the River­side Carpark fa­cil­i­ty. In or­der to ef­fec­tive­ly move peo­ple, we need to be able to force peo­ple to come off the streets,” John­son told the JSC.

She added that once the pro­posed leg­is­la­tion is in place and they have that au­thor­i­ty then it will al­low the Min­istry to care and pro­tect the so­cial­ly dis­placed.

John­son ad­mit­ted that there is a So­cial Dis­place­ment Unit which is tasked with out­reach and au­dit­ing the num­ber of so­cial­ly dis­placed peo­ple in the coun­try, and cur­rent­ly there are on­ly two peo­ple do­ing this job.

“Coun­try­wide?” asked a shocked Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly who chaired the sit­ting.

“Coun­try­wide,” an­swered John­son.

Gads­by-Dol­ly crit­i­cized that this cur­rent arrange­ment could give the im­pres­sion that the coun­try was not se­ri­ous about car­ing for its so­cial­ly dis­placed.

How­ev­er, John­son said the plan is to build a state-of-the-art fa­cil­i­ty in Port of Spain that will pro­vide ac­com­mo­da­tions for street dwellers while they un­der­go re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion.

Mean­while, both the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) and the Port of Spain City Cor­po­ra­tion Po­lice ad­mit­ted that when it comes to forcibly re­mov­ing peo­ple off the streets their “hands are tied.”

“Home­less­ness is not a crime,” said TTPS le­gal ad­vi­sor Ter­rence Dick, “we tried to re­move peo­ple al­ready and the court said we were go­ing about it the wrong way”.

It was re­vealed at the JSC by the Min­istry of So­cial De­vel­op­ment and Fam­i­ly Ser­vices that there are 219 street dwellers in the cap­i­tal.