JENSEN LA VENDE

Se­nior Re­porter

jensen.lavende@guardian.co.tt

The five Sil­ver Stars Steel Or­ches­tra play­ers who were ar­rest­ed on Sun­day fol­low­ing a scuf­fle with po­lice of­fi­cers dur­ing the TRIBE band launch, have been charged for vary­ing of­fences.

Je­lani Ciel­to, Xavier Vil­lafana, Aquila Pereira, An­del Ham­let and Gle­nanne De Sil­va, were charged with ob­scene lan­guage, dis­or­der­ly be­hav­iour and re­sist­ing ar­rest. Pereira was al­so charged with as­sault­ing a po­lice of­fi­cer.

The play­ers were grant­ed sta­tion bail on Mon­day evening and are ex­pect­ed to ap­pear be­fore the court “on a date to be de­ter­mined,” ac­cord­ing to po­lice. Guardian Me­dia was in­formed that the five are to ap­pear in court on Mon­day.

Ac­cord­ing to po­lice, the four men and woman were held fol­low­ing a con­fronta­tion with po­lice on Sun­day morn­ing. In a re­lease, the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice said ac­cord­ing to the li­cence ac­quired by or­gan­is­ers TRIBE, mu­sic was sup­posed to be cut off at 2 am. Af­ter the DJ stopped play­ing, how­ev­er, the play­ers con­tin­ued play­ing be­fore the po­lice in­ter­rupt­ed them.

“Dur­ing these in­ter­ac­tions, sev­er­al in­di­vid­u­als al­leged­ly be­came con­fronta­tion­al and ver­bal­ly abu­sive to­wards po­lice of­fi­cers. The sit­u­a­tion sub­se­quent­ly es­ca­lat­ed, re­sult­ing in one po­lice of­fi­cer be­ing phys­i­cal­ly as­sault­ed while at­tempt­ing to ef­fect a law­ful ar­rest. The of­fi­cer sus­tained in­juries and was tak­en to the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal, where he was med­ical­ly ex­am­ined and treat­ed be­fore be­ing dis­charged. The ac­cused was al­so med­ical­ly ex­am­ined,” a T&TPS re­lease said.

Dur­ing her ap­pear­ance on CNC3’s The Morn­ing Brew pro­gramme yes­ter­day, Pan Trin­ba­go pres­i­dent Bev­er­ley Ram­sey-Moore said the en­tire sit­u­a­tion could have been avoid­ed if po­lice had ap­proached the or­gan­is­ers rather than the play­ers, who she said were sim­ply hired to per­form and would not have been aware of the agreed fin­ish­ing times. She said the way the na­tion­al in­stru­ment was treat­ed was al­so dis­grace­ful, with play­ers now hav­ing to re­tune a dam­aged pan.

“A high-grade tenor pan is about $10,000. Let me tell you some­thing: to tune one pan, you may be play­ing a four-pan, and the tun­ing, that four-pan, so it might be $400 per pan. Dif­fer­ent tuners use dif­fer­ent prices. That’s $1,600 for just that one sec­tion of pan alone.”

Ram­sey-Moore added that the way the steel­pan was treat­ed dur­ing the fra­cas was not in keep­ing with the na­tion­al in­stru­ment.

In a so­cial me­dia post, Sil­ver Stars man­age­ment de­nied its mem­bers as­sault­ed po­lice.

“We would like to make it clear that the play­ers of Sil­ver Stars did not, at any point, aggress or put hands on any­one, nor were we de­fi­ant when asked to stop play­ing,” the re­lease said.

The re­lease added that mov­ing for­ward, it is hoped that as a na­tion, “we can have greater re­spect for the steel­pan, our na­tion­al in­stru­ment and for steel­pan per­form­ers.”

The re­lease added that Sil­ver Stars mem­bers are not crim­i­nals but pro­fes­sion­al mu­si­cians and steel­pan am­bas­sadors and was a band that prides it­self on dis­ci­pline, adding its rep­u­ta­tion pre­cedes them.