The Move­ment for So­cial Jus­tice (MSJ) is re­new­ing its call for all po­lice of­fi­cers to be out­fit­ted with body cam­eras.

It comes in the wake of a cou­ple of re­cent po­lice-in­volved shoot­ings which turned fa­tal.

In a news re­lease, MSJ chair­man Gre­go­ry Fer­nan­des calls on Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Gary Grif­fith to ad­dress the is­sue, to en­sure that work­ing class com­mu­ni­ties—where many po­lice in­volved shoot­ings take place—can trust the po­lice nar­ra­tive on such in­ci­dents, rather than con­tin­u­ing to view them with sus­pi­cion.

The full text of the MSJ’s state­ment, fol­lows…

COME ON GARY, WHERE ARE THE LONG-PROMISED BODY CAM­ERAS?

The Move­ment for So­cial Jus­tice (MSJ) is very con­cerned that there con­tin­ues to be an es­ca­la­tion of po­lice killings in Trinidad and To­ba­go and that the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice who promised to im­ple­ment body cam­eras on Po­lice of­fi­cers is yet to do so, some 2 years af­ter he made the promise to the coun­try. There con­tin­ues to be the an­guish of cit­i­zens who claim that the po­lice are ex­e­cut­ing per­sons in their com­mu­ni­ty, whilst the po­lice claim oth­er­wise. The peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go need to know the truth and we just can­not take the po­lice’s state­ment as fact when we have had many in­stances in the past when this has not been so. Even the Com­mis­sion­er ad­mits that there are many rogue el­e­ments in the Po­lice ser­vice.

These po­lice killings al­so gen­er­al­ly hap­pen in work­ing class com­mu­ni­ties, are oc­cur­ring with im­puni­ty, and it seems that the Po­lice Com­plaints Au­thor­i­ty is very con­strained as an in­ves­ti­gate in­sti­tu­tion as the pub­lic rarely hears any­thing, if at all, about the out­come of these po­lice killings. 

The MSJ have al­ways said there is a sec­tion of the pop­u­la­tion who seem not to mat­ter, who are voice­less, and who face the brunt of the in­equities and in­jus­tice in the so­ci­ety. Many who should know bet­ter do not seem to even want to raise their voic­es in these cir­cum­stances.

The MSJ will al­ways stand with the voice­less in the so­ci­ety. Their lives al­so mat­ter, and we call on Com­mis­sion­er Grif­fith to ur­gent­ly ad­dress this out­ra­geous and vex­ing sit­u­a­tion. Some­how the po­lice can get all the oth­er dead­ly gear they need to car­ry out their re­spon­si­bil­i­ties but can­not ad­dress the is­suance of body cam­eras to po­lice of­fi­cers. Ridicu­lous!

We will con­tin­ue to press the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice on this mat­ter un­til it is re­solved.