Police persecution

There is no doubt that vendors walking up and down between lanes of vehicles on our highways pose a danger not only to themselves but to motorists. It clearly needs control, but we see no reason for the current persecution of our newspaper vendors at different points on the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway in the early hours of the morning. This is the time of day when the traffic is bumper to bumper and people take the opportunity to get their newspapers from the vendors at the side of the road. In addition, the majority of these vendors are young people who are trying to make an honest living by selling newspapers. Yet, for some reason they have become the major target of motorbike policemen who not only order them off the highway but pursue them into side streets ordering them to go home.

While all this is going on, the Government is announcing grand plans to teach skills to the young and to make them employable, the few who are already earning money are being deprived of doing so by an arm of the state, namely the police. Yes, the very police who would be only too quick at the slightest provocation to react violently should a young man or woman armed only with the day’s newspaper try to resist. We have to question what is behind this when even a passing newspaper van is followed and stopped, the driver thoroughly questioned. The persecution of newspaper vendors (and others) began about a fortnight ago, and apart from hobbling the vendors whose sole purpose is to earn an honest livelihood, it represents, however inadvertently, both an indirect lashing out at the freedom of the Press and the right of the public to be informed. We wish to make it clear that we understand the problem of indiscreet vendors of whatever product, who are operating along the nation’s highways and main roads. These particular vendors have not only been responsible for the effective slowing down of traffic on these arteries and contributing to traffic buildups, but often pose a danger to themselves and other users of the roadways when they rush across to sell their wares.

Clearly, however, in the case of newspapers these are dropped off at relatively early hours of the morning, when few persons are stirring, and a vehicle of any sort is a rarity. People caught up in the later traffic jams are only too glad to be able to buy a newspaper. The harassment of vendors coincided with the start of the Police campaign around Easter to curb the number of traffic accidents, all too many of them fatal, which had bedevilled the nation’s roadways. The Police crackdown on highway vending was both understandable and necessary. But for Police officers to go into hardly trafficked sideroads and persecute vendors and distributors on the flimsy pretext that they were seeking to guarantee the free flow of traffic was unnecessary and ludicrous.

The officers with their motorbikes could have been better employed to deter motorists from speeding along highways and main roads, and indeed to go after the many criminals in our midst rather than indulge in what was clearly tantamount to Police persecution of persons seeking an honest living, and in the process denying scores of readers the right to be informed. Even in the crowded city of Port-of-Spain the Mayor has recognised the essential role of newspapers and allows newspaper vendors to operate. The Commissioner of Police needs to find out the real reason for putting young newspaper vendors on the highways out of jobs.