OT­TO CAR­RING­TON

ot­to.car­ring­ton@cnc3.co.tt

The Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice on Thurs­day as­sured that Port-of-Spain is safe.

This comes af­ter the Port-of-Spain May­or, DO­MA and oth­ers raised con­cern about crime in the cap­i­tal af­ter the mur­der of wa­ter ven­dor Joel Williams last week and the wide­spread protests in Beetham, Sea Lots and parts of east Port-of-Spain, fol­low­ing the re­cent fa­tal po­lice killing of three young men along In­de­pen­dence Square.

Speak­ing dur­ing yes­ter­day’s TTPS me­dia brief­ing, head of the Port-of-Spain Di­vi­sion, Se­nior Su­per­in­ten­dent Bran­don Neil John, said, “Port-of-Spain Di­vi­sion is one of the most im­por­tant places in the coun­try. For the first part of the year, we have adopt­ed a one-city ap­proach in terms of polic­ing the city of Port-of-Spain, in­volv­ing and en­gag­ing all stake­hold­ers in­volved in the city...Our ap­proach is to en­sure safe­ty and se­cu­ri­ty for the cit­i­zens in Port-of-Spain on a dai­ly ba­sis, 24 hours a day.”

He added, “To do that, we need­ed to get all hands on deck, all per­sons in­volved... mil­i­tary, para­mil­i­tary and civil­ian, so it means that polic­ing in Port-of-Spain is not just for the po­lice and the City Po­lice, but it is every­one who has a hand in Port-of-Spain, in­volved with se­ries of ini­tia­tives to al­low for this to take place. We have seen some foot­steps in the right di­rec­tion in achiev­ing our goals.”

But John said de­spite the col­lab­o­ra­tive ap­proach to keep­ing the cap­i­tal safe, there have been set­backs, not the least of which has been gang vi­o­lence.

“We have done an as­sess­ment for the first half of the year. We have had some chal­lenges... one of them be­ing our re­peat­ed in­ci­dents of gang vi­o­lence that plague the city to some ex­tent. And we had some chal­lenges with the lar­ce­ny of mo­tor ve­hi­cles, rob­beries.”

How­ev­er, the di­vi­sion­al head said of­fi­cers were able to ex­am­ine the da­ta and use it to pool re­sources to fo­cus on these prob­lem ar­eas. He said since then, there have been some de­vel­op­ments.

Mean­while, Su­per­in­ten­dent Glen Charles, of the City Po­lice, ad­dressed the is­sue of vi­o­lence in schools in and around the cap­i­tal city. He said af­ter sev­er­al dis­cus­sions and con­ver­sa­tions, of­fi­cers were able to iden­ti­fy the schools whose stu­dents were the ones en­gag­ing in acts of vi­o­lence in the streets of Port-of-Spain. From there, he said of­fi­cers reached out to school deans, teach­ers and par­ents.

“We have of­fered as­sis­tance to those in­di­vid­u­als we know that need coun­selling and so that is an on­go­ing process by our Pub­lic En­gage­ment and Wel­fare De­part­ment and since then it has been a suc­cess,” Supt Charles said.

Re­gard­ing the safe­ty of busi­ness­es which op­er­ate in the cap­i­tal city, he said, “What we did is that we had sev­er­al meet­ings with the busi­ness sec­tor and they par­tic­i­pat­ed with the busi­nessper­sons and we formed a com­mu­ni­ca­tion plat­form where they could com­mu­ni­cate on a dai­ly ba­sis.”

He said that plat­form is mon­i­tored by the TTPS.

The TTPS is al­so rolling out oth­er ini­tia­tives to elim­i­nate crime, which in­clude train­ing in the use of CCTV and mon­i­tor­ing as an ad­di­tion­al tool for law en­force­ment.