Rhon­dor Dowlat

The Sea Lots West Com­mu­ni­ty Im­pact and Home Work Cen­tre was left dam­aged dur­ing a po­lice raid on Sat­ur­day night and res­i­dents are la­belling it as a provo­ca­tion by the po­lice.

Since the dead­ly dri­ve-by shoot­ing at Pi­o­neer Dri­ve on Feb­ru­ary 2, in which two peo­ple were killed and eight oth­ers left wound­ed, res­i­dents said the area had been very tense.

In this lat­est in­ci­dent, at about 10 pm, two ve­hi­cles with po­lice of­fi­cers re­port­ed­ly went the com­mu­ni­ty cen­tre where they broke down parts of the ceil­ing, doors and plumb­ing fix­tures.

The of­fi­cers con­duct­ed their search for over an hour but had a lot of op­po­si­tion by scores of res­i­dents who made their way to the cen­tre and voiced their dis­gust over the of­fi­cers’ be­hav­iour.

The po­lice of­fi­cers turned up emp­ty hand­ed as they found no guns or drugs.

One res­i­dent, who spoke to the Guardian Me­dia un­der strict anonymi­ty yes­ter­day dur­ing a tour of the cen­tre, showed the dam­age that he said would take thou­sands of dol­lars to re­pair.

“While we un­der­stand that the po­lice have their jobs to do we are ob­ject­ing to the man­ner in which they are do­ing it.

“They are com­ing in here and pro­vok­ing us. Imag­ine one of the of­fi­cers giv­ing us an Is­lam­ic greet­ing,” the res­i­dent said.

The res­i­dent strong­ly be­lieves that be­cause they were at­tacked, po­lice of­fi­cers were al­leged­ly us­ing the sit­u­a­tion to take ad­van­tage of them.

“Be­sides the po­lice of­fi­cers who are stand­ing guard at the cor­ner, and at points close by there are the of­fi­cers from oth­er units com­ing in here and ha­rass­ing us. Imag­ine our chil­dren and youths in the area come here to the cen­tre to use it for home­work and oth­er class­es like leather craft work, etc. At least three times a week the chil­dren come here to learn, to ed­u­cate them­selves,” the res­i­dent said.

Asked how the area has been since the dead­ly dri­ve-by shoot­ing, the res­i­dent said: “Re­al tense…we are un­easy. Whilst we ap­pre­ci­ate po­lice of­fi­cers pa­trolling fre­quent­ly and park­ing up to pro­tect us we feel that some of the po­lice com­ing in here linked di­rect­ly with the Mus­lims and we feel that any day any one of us can be tak­en and dropped off in en­e­my ter­ri­to­ry to be killed and that is the re­al­i­ty of it,” the res­i­dent added.

Ac­cord­ing to a po­lice source, who wished not to be iden­ti­fied, crime and gun vi­o­lence es­ca­lat­ed over the past three weeks af­ter the re­lease of a well-known in­di­vid­ual from John John, who po­lice said, was a high rank­ing mem­ber of the Mus­lims Gang.

Po­lice said they were fever­ish­ly work­ing on in­tel­li­gence and will be “flush­ing out the gangs through­out T&T, not just in the Port-of-Spain ar­eas.