Par­lia­ment’s unan­i­mous ap­proval of the ap­point­ment of Er­la Hare­wood-Christo­pher as the first woman to head the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) is a his­toric event that is, un­for­tu­nate­ly, over­shad­owed by an un­prece­dent­ed in­crease in vi­o­lent crime.

The new Com­mis­sion­er will not have the ben­e­fit of an easy tran­si­tion. There can be no hon­ey­moon pe­ri­od for Mrs Hare­wood-Christo­pher, who, dur­ing her stint as act­ing CoP, had to con­front the high­est mur­der toll in the coun­try’s his­to­ry, in­clud­ing the dead­liest Jan­u­ary on record.

Now, that tough mis­sion be­comes her full-time job.

Still, this is a mo­ment of great sig­nif­i­cance in the 225-year his­to­ry of the TTPS, an event in the mak­ing for al­most 68 years.

The first gen­der bar­ri­ers were re­moved in the TTPS in 1955, when women were al­lowed to join the ranks to deal with ju­ve­niles and fe­male of­fend­ers.

CoP Hare­wood-Christo­pher’s path was laid by the 12 pi­o­neer­ing women who were draft­ed in­to the force on Au­gust 12, 1955.

Those women, se­lect­ed from 1,700 ap­pli­cants, were Pearl Bruce, Jes­si­ca Smith, Doreen Lum­press, Mavis Grif­fith, Cyn­thia Cole, Myr­tle Payne, Cyn­thia Sealy, Elsie Cum­mings, Phyl­lis Wil­son, Irene Co­zi­er, Mer­le Lewis and Sheila Cipri­ani.

The new CoP wasn’t even born when those first fe­male of­fi­cers were re­cruit­ed and the po­lice force they en­tered was rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent from the one over which she now takes charge.

For one thing, it is a much larg­er en­ti­ty, com­pris­ing more than 7,000 men and women in var­i­ous ranks.

Of greater con­cern, how­ev­er, is that CoP Hare­wood-Christo­pher is tak­ing the helm of a TTPS grap­pling with a dead­ly es­ca­la­tion in crime.

It is a mat­ter of record that 2022, the coun­try’s dead­liest year ever, was al­so marked by an abysmal po­lice de­tec­tion rate for mur­ders of just 12.5 per cent.

At the helm, Mrs Hare­wood-Christo­pher must deal head-on with grow­ing pub­lic pres­sure to ad­dress crime and the out­pour­ings of fear and out­rage from all cor­ners of so­ci­ety

The cur­rent grim sit­u­a­tion should not have tak­en ei­ther CoP Hare­wood-Christo­pher or the of­fi­cers who pre­vi­ous­ly oc­cu­pied the po­si­tion by sur­prise.

There was a pre­dic­tion of the cur­rent spike in vi­o­lent crime in a 2021 se­cu­ri­ty re­port of T&T’s main in­tel­li­gence unit, the Strate­gic Ser­vices Agency (SSA), a warn­ing of a splin­ter­ing of gangs that was trig­ger­ing “an in­crease in mur­ders, in­juries, shoot­ings and oth­er vi­o­lent crimes.”

Those SSA pro­jec­tions are now a re­al­i­ty con­fronting cit­i­zens dai­ly.

The new CoP, al­ready fo­cused on dis­man­tling the crim­i­nal gangs run­ning ram­pant across the coun­try, al­so faces the Her­culean task of in­ter­cept­ing the large num­bers of il­le­gal weapons be­ing smug­gled in from the Unit­ed States and Venezuela, as well as weed­ing out in­dis­ci­pline and cor­rup­tion in the ranks.

The onus is now on CoP Hare­wood-Christo­pher, who re­cent­ly pledged to work hard­er and “make all ef­forts to bring swift long-term and short-term in­ter­ven­tions which will im­pact crime re­duc­tion gen­er­al­ly and mur­ders specif­i­cal­ly,” to suc­ceed where past com­mis­sion­ers failed.

Her lega­cy will de­pend on her ca­pac­i­ty to ful­ly im­ple­ment 21st Cen­tu­ry law en­force­ment prac­tices, and come up with the right for­mu­la for fight­ing crime through ef­fec­tive com­mu­ni­ty-build­ing and pre­ven­ta­tive polic­ing.

As she sets about that dif­fi­cult mis­sion, we wish her all the best.