Shane Su­perville

The use of a drone in the ear­ly hours of the morn­ing has aroused the sus­pi­cions of some Cunu­pia res­i­dents, who have sought ad­vice from the po­lice on whether there was any­thing il­le­gal in its use.

The is­sue was raised dur­ing a po­lice town hall meet­ing at the Cunu­pia Sec­ondary School, Has­sarath Lane, on Tues­day night by a Chin Chin Road res­i­dent who re­port­ed see­ing the drone in dif­fer­ent parts of his com­mu­ni­ty and al­most al­ways late at night.

The man said he sus­pect­ed the drones sight­ed were the same and asked of­fi­cers if it was pos­si­ble that the drone was be­ing used by crim­i­nals to 'scout' ar­eas be­fore strik­ing.

"I don't want to say it has been do­ing sur­veil­lance in our com­mu­ni­ty, how­ev­er, one would think that at 1.30 am it's a bit odd for drones to be fly­ing. The com­mu­ni­ty is just over one kilo­me­tre in terms of cir­cum­fer­ence so it's pret­ty big. That be­ing said we have seen this drone at 1.30 am, 2.30 am, 3 am and it's not just in one par­tic­u­lar place but we've seen it in the fur­thest parts of the com­mu­ni­ty from the north to the south."

The man said the own­er of the drone re­mained a mys­tery and said while res­i­dents were not com­fort­able with the use of the de­vice, they were un­clear how to pro­ceed.

In his re­sponse, Supt Miguel Mon­trichard said while there was no law against what times drones could be used, it could pos­si­bly be ben­e­fi­cial in hav­ing laws sur­round­ing drones re­viewed to clamp down on use by crim­i­nals.

"The law hasn't caught up with the abil­i­ty peo­ple have to use drones to do il­le­gal ac­tiv­i­ties so that's a point to be not­ed."

"I think be­cause this is a pub­lic meet­ing some lawyer or some­one with the means with our as­sis­tance can bring this to the at­ten­tion of the au­thor­i­ties who can make the nec­es­sary leg­isla­tive amend­ments."

Mon­trichard added that at present the on­ly laws re­strict­ing how drones should be used were ones which pro­hib­it­ed them from be­ing flown over Port-of-Spain and near air­ports.

In­sp In­shan Teeluck of the Cunu­pia Po­lice Sta­tion al­so re­spond­ed to the con­cerns and said the in­ci­dent was brought to his at­ten­tion.