Jensen La Vende

Se­nior Re­porter

jensen.lavende@guardian.co.tt

Po­lice have placed some sus­pect­ed gang mem­bers held dur­ing the on­go­ing State of Emer­gency (SoE) un­der house ar­rest as they con­tin­ue to tar­get those they have iden­ti­fied as pri­or­i­ty of­fend­ers.

Dur­ing a me­dia brief­ing yes­ter­day, ACP in charge of Ad­min­is­tra­tion and Op­er­a­tions, Richard Smith, said while he could not iden­ti­fy and give sta­tis­tics about all of those con­fined to their homes, one man, who was once charged with be­ing a gang leader, is al­so now un­der house ar­rest.

Calvin “Tyson” Lee, who lives at Clifton Hill Tow­ers, St Paul Street, East Port-of-Spain, was ar­rest­ed on De­cem­ber 30, mo­ments af­ter the SoE was an­nounced and was re­leased eight days lat­er. Dur­ing his time in cus­tody, he was de­tained at the Bel­mont Po­lice Sta­tion and was not ques­tioned up to his re­lease.

Smith, when asked about Lee’s de­ten­tion, said: “Mr Lee was re­leased. How­ev­er, he is cur­rent­ly un­der, I would say, de­ten­tion at his home through or­ders that were is­sued by the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice un­der Sec­tion 4C of the (SoE) reg­u­la­tions.”

Smith added that of the 40-plus pri­or­i­ty of­fend­ers who are al­leged­ly af­fil­i­at­ed with gang ac­tiv­i­ties, oth­ers are un­der house ar­rest but he could not give any fur­ther de­tails.

Lee, ac­cord­ing to po­lice, was the in­tend­ed tar­get when gun­men wait­ed out­side the Besson Street Po­lice Sta­tion on De­cem­ber 28, 2024. Trevor Williams, who was ac­com­pa­ny­ing Lee at the time, was killed when the gun­men fired at the group as they left the sta­tion af­ter Lee had signed the bail book. A day lat­er, Cleon Lu­g­in, 37, Der­ron Cal­liste, 35, Kam­bon Omowale, 39, Garet Smart, and Ryan Lessey, 24, were killed in a sus­pect­ed reprisal at­tack.

The fol­low­ing day, the SoE was an­nounced, af­ter po­lice told Gov­ern­ment it had in­for­ma­tion of in­tend­ed in­creased gang vi­o­lence with the use of high-pow­ered weapons.

Deputy Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Ju­nior Ben­jamin al­so said since the SoE be­gan there had been 473 op­er­a­tions tar­get­ing 503 pri­or­i­ty of­fend­ers, with 360 peo­ple ar­rest­ed. He said there were 321 traf­fic op­er­a­tions re­sult­ing in 951 traf­fic of­fences. Over­all, there were 2,495 search­es with 22 guns and 818 rounds of as­sort­ed am­mu­ni­tion re­cov­ered, and 84 kilo­grammes of mar­i­jua­na and 592 grammes of co­caine seized.

Ben­jamin said the po­lice will learn from their SoE strate­gies.

“We con­tin­ue to in­ten­si­fy our work. We are hop­ing and, again, ap­pre­ci­at­ing that there are lessons learned. We will con­tin­ue to learn from those lessons, so that even af­ter the SoE, we are say­ing with the out­comes, with the lessons learned, we are go­ing to put the nec­es­sary re­sults in terms of our goals go­ing for­ward.”

Of­fi­cers must re­port to du­ty

Mean­while, Ben­jamin said the po­lice are well sup­port­ed by the De­fence Force while Smith called on po­lice of­fi­cers to heed the call to re­turn from va­ca­tion. Smith said fail­ing to ad­here can lead to dis­ci­pli­nary ac­tion. All po­lice of­fi­cers have been asked to re­port to du­ty as the coun­try is un­der a SoE.

Ben­jamin added that the is­sue of ve­hi­cles is be­ing ad­dressed.

In a me­dia re­lease last Oc­to­ber, the po­lice said it ac­quired 166 new ve­hi­cles, with 93 be­ing added to its fleet im­me­di­ate­ly and 73 more by De­cem­ber.

Asked about this, Ben­jamin said the ad­di­tion­al ve­hi­cles were not re­ceived and it is be­ing ad­dressed.

“Well, present­ly, we have some of the ve­hi­cles. Even up to to­day, we have put things in place and we are work­ing on get­ting the next set of ve­hi­cles. But again, we are putting those things in place to en­sure with­in the very near fu­ture, we have that so that it can at least help us in terms of in­creased mo­bil­i­ty and get­ting things done, prob­a­bly af­ter the SoE. But it is in train even as we speak.”