It was the British writer CS Lewis who fa­mous­ly said ‘in­tegri­ty is do­ing the right thing even when no one is watch­ing’.

Oth­er no­table de­f­i­n­i­tions of in­tegri­ty sug­gest a per­son who is in­cor­rupt­ible and hon­est, with strong moral prin­ci­ples.

This brings us to the very pub­lic com­plaint is­sued by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley this past week­end, amid the wor­ry­ing mur­der rate in this coun­try which has al­ready crossed 300 for 2023, that there are sim­ply “too many crim­i­nals in the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice”.

His rem­e­dy for this is to not on­ly es­tab­lish ‘a spe­cial­ly vet­ted unit’ with­in the TTPS to in­ves­ti­gate cor­rupt po­lice of­fi­cers but al­so to pay of­fi­cers more for hav­ing their in­tegri­ty in­tact.

First­ly, it needs to be said for the ben­e­fit of Dr Row­ley, who should al­ready know, that there are crim­i­nal el­e­ments every­where—not on­ly in the TTPS, but in Cus­toms, Par­lia­ment, in our cor­po­rate sec­tor, the Ju­di­cia­ry, and even in the me­dia. There­fore, the chal­lenge of rout­ing out the bad el­e­ments is not for the TTPS alone—it’s a na­tion­al chal­lenge.

Sec­ond­ly, the old adage re­mains that ‘one bad ap­ple will spoil the en­tire bunch’; so, if in­deed our Prime Min­is­ter has ev­i­dence of these ‘bad ap­ples’ in the TTPS, we chal­lenge him and his Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Fitzger­ald Hinds, along with Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Er­la Hare­wood-Christo­pher to en­sure they are both iden­ti­fied and pros­e­cut­ed as nec­es­sary.

This, we be­lieve, will go a long way to­ward ad­dress­ing the cur­rent mis­trust of the TTPS and, by ex­ten­sion, the Gov­ern­ment.

How­ev­er, at this stage, it will do none of us any good to be mak­ing un­rea­son­able and un­re­al­is­tic promis­es or nam­ing and sham­ing any one group—least of all our men and women on the front­line of fight­ing crime—with­out the req­ui­site ev­i­dence or plan of cen­sor.

Fur­ther­more, it is de­bat­able whether any new spe­cial unit in the TTPS will de­liv­er to the pop­u­lace the de­sired re­lief from crime, par­tic­u­lar­ly mur­ders. God knows there have been many spe­cial units be­fore, not to men­tion we al­ready have a Po­lice Com­plaints Au­thor­i­ty and a pro­fes­sion­al com­plaints bu­reau to in­ves­ti­gate per­ceived mis­deeds by of­fi­cers.

Even more du­bi­ous is the ex­pec­ta­tion of im­proved hon­esty and moral­i­ty with­in the TTPS, based on a promise from the com­man­der in chief of big­ger pay­cheques for a se­lect ‘vet­ted’ group.

If any­thing, this may de­mo­ti­vate and de­mor­alise those who are al­ready work­ing tire­less­ly in the ser­vice with­out prop­er com­pen­sa­tion.

While mon­ey is un­doubt­ed­ly a mo­ti­va­tor, the Prime Min­is­ter may have been bet­ter served in his speech at Sat­ur­day night’s PNM po­lit­i­cal meet­ing to at­tach his mon­ey promis­es to bet­ter per­for­mance over­all, in­stead of sin­gling out a yet-to-be-con­sti­tut­ed vet­ted unit for spe­cial treat­ment.

At the end of the day, if pub­lic trust and con­fi­dence are to re­turn to the TTPS, all of­fi­cers, no mat­ter the rank, must be re­gard­ed as men and women of in­tegri­ty, who can be trust­ed to do what is right when no one, not even Dr Row­ley, is watch­ing.