T&T: Police hiding in stations from criminals : PM Rowley

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley says some po­lice of­fi­cers are now pre­tend­ing to close sta­tions to hide from crim­i­nals.

He made the com­ment yes­ter­day as the Par­lia­ment de­bat­ed the ra­tio­nale for the State of Emer­gency (SoE) and a fur­ther three-month ex­ten­sion to it in sep­a­rate mo­tions.

The Prime Min­is­ter said crim­i­nals had be­come so brazen that they be­lieve they can, with­out fear, shoot and kill even the po­lice.

“So when of­fi­cers are in the po­lice sta­tions, it has come to my at­ten­tion, in some dis­tricts, in some in­stances, po­lice of­fi­cers whose job it is to pro­tect us and se­cure us, in some dis­tricts at night, are so afraid of the crim­i­nals that they close the po­lice sta­tion door, turn off the light, and be in­side there hop­ing that the crim­i­nals don’t come at them,” Row­ley re­vealed.

He added, “When cit­i­zens iden­ti­fy­ing them­selves as law break­ers choose as their place of at­tack to be in front of a po­lice sta­tion in­side the city, and to car­ry out an at­tack us­ing the most so­phis­ti­cat­ed killing weapons, it tells you they have no re­gard for law en­force­ment in our so­ci­ety.”

He said this has led to the be­lief that the reg­u­lar laws are not suf­fi­cient to treat with the harsh­ness of the crim­i­nal el­e­ment.

He lament­ed the dif­fi­cul­ty his Gov­ern­ment has faced in deal­ing with mur­ders.

“The bot­tom line is this so­ci­ety has been un­der at­tack from a crim­i­nal el­e­ment which we have not been able to sup­press,” Row­ley said.

He ac­knowl­edged, how­ev­er, that some peo­ple be­lieve solv­ing crime is a straight­for­ward task.

“I know there are some peo­ple who be­lieve this is easy to get rid of but if it was so easy to get rid of, we would have got­ten rid of it al­ready, but in­stead, what we are see­ing is the can­cer is spread­ing,” the Prime Min­is­ter said.

He re­it­er­at­ed that the rea­sons for the SoE were out­lined in the Pres­i­dent’s de­c­la­ra­tion.

Those were over 60 mur­ders in De­cem­ber and to deal with the threat to pub­lic safe­ty from gangs’ reprisal at­tacks.

“At that point, the Gov­ern­ment, what­ev­er re­luc­tance we had with re­spect to a SoE, we had to in­ter­vene, the Gov­ern­ment had to in­ter­vene,” the Prime Min­is­ter said.