RHON­DOR DOWLAT-ROS­TANT

A war of words has erupt­ed be­tween act­ing Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith and his pre­de­ces­sor Stephen Williams, fu­elled by their dif­fer­ences of opin­ion over the is­su­ing of firearm users li­cences.

The ex­changes es­ca­lat­ed af­ter Williams, in a ra­dio in­ter­view yes­ter­day, de­scribed Grif­fith as “an ig­no­rant nar­cis­sis­tic type per­son.”

In re­sponse, the act­ing CoP was crit­i­cal of Williams’ tenure at the helm of the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS), stat­ing: “He said noth­ing, he did noth­ing. He was a to­tal fail­ure. Every sin­gle thing went up­side down in the Po­lice Ser­vice and he has the au­dac­i­ty now to want to speak.”

The two men have been trad­ing barbs since a news­pa­per re­port over the week­end about firearms li­cences.

In an in­ter­view yes­ter­day on I95FM, Williams ac­cused Grif­fith of spread­ing in­cor­rect in­for­ma­tion about the is­su­ing of Firearms Users Li­cences (FULs) and said he did not un­der­stand his role as the head of the TTPS.

“I hear the act­ing Com­mis­sion­er con­tin­u­ous­ly say­ing that cit­i­zens of Trinidad and To­ba­go have the right to be armed. He’s ig­no­rant of the port­fo­lio and he’s a nar­cis­sis­tic type per­son. It is all about him… him alone and no­body shouldn’t say any­thing, whether it makes sense or it doesn’t make sense, whether is the Prime Min­is­ter, the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance, the Law As­so­ci­a­tion, who­ev­er. He lis­tens to ab­solute­ly no one and once you speak, he at­tacks,” Williams said

His com­ments came one day af­ter Grif­fith took aim at Williams dur­ing a TTPS me­dia con­fer­ence, crit­i­cis­ing the for­mer CoP for his ob­jec­tions to li­cens­es be­ing grant­ed to in­di­vid­u­als to own mul­ti­ple weapons.

Acting Commissioner of Police Gary Griffith.

“You have a prob­lem with law-abid­ing cit­i­zens car­ry­ing firearms but you nev­er said a word about 37,000 il­le­gal firearms out there by cold-blood­ed killers,” Grif­fith told re­porters on Mon­day.

The tit-for-tat con­tin­ued yes­ter­day, with Williams con­tend­ing that no one is en­ti­tled to hold a gun in this coun­try but that Grif­fith was go­ing about say­ing “once you qual­i­fied, you are en­ti­tled to a firearm. The law doesn’t pro­vide any en­ti­tle­ment to any firearm.”

Williams said he should have spo­ken out with­in the last three years but did not want to be in any pub­lic bat­tle with any­one.

In re­sponse, Grif­fith said for six years Williams said noth­ing and did noth­ing.

“He left with 14 per cent pub­lic sup­port of the Po­lice Ser­vice be­cause of his fail­ures. I turned it from 14 to 39 per cent. This man had over three decades of po­lice ex­pe­ri­ence and some­one of no ex­pe­ri­ence was able to beat him in every sin­gle of the eight as­sess­ments com­ing and go­ing.”

He fur­ther claimed: “The man was a to­tal dis­as­ter, nev­er want­ed to speak to the me­dia. Now all of a sud­den, he wants to speak.”

Grif­fith ac­cused Williams of al­low­ing his per­son­al opin­ions on gun own­er­ship to in­flu­ence his du­ties as com­mis­sion­er.

The act­ing CoP said there are ro­bust sys­tems in place dur­ing and af­ter the ap­pli­ca­tion process for a firearms li­cence, to en­sure peo­ple are com­pe­tent and re­spon­si­ble enough to own weapons and the TTPS will con­tin­ue to en­force manda­to­ry train­ing for le­gal firearm own­ers.

“It is there in the law, and I in­tend to en­force it, where every sin­gle per­son who has a firearm must go to an es­tab­lished range, where you will be mon­i­tored and trained on how to use your firearm and use it to have it clear and safe,” Grif­fith said.