AG: Mission to track cops’ cases

Speaking yesterday to Newsday, Al-Rawi pointed out that the budgetary allocation to the police for the period 2006-2016, both appropriations and supplementary appropriations, was $20.8 billion which is “no small sum of money”. He reported the Attorney General’s office will be conducting a fact-finding mission, which they will bring to the public, to ascertain how many police there are and in how many stations, how many reports received, and tracking of these reports and how many are turned into an investigation, charge and conviction and over what time period. Al-Rawi said these things were never brought to light in Trinidad and Tobago and when they are not measured it “encourages a lack of performance” and “throwing money at solutions without value for money”.

He stressed this country has a higher ratio of police per capita than most other jurisdictions, though he did not have the figure off hand.

“We have police in Trinidad and Tobago.

The Police Service is well manned,” he said.

He said this is why the Prime Minister and the National Security Council have been speaking with the people under the Commissioner of Police together with him including divisional heads and station commanders.

He pointed out that in terms of international standard this country has a significant number of police to population, they have spent vast sums of money on the Police Service and “it is now for police to apply the law”.

“We continue to call upon police to do their job,” he stressed.

Speaking about the need to enforce legislation relation to fireworks in particular, he gave the example of the speed limit always being 80 km/h but when six speed guns were introduced the driving structure in this country was changed.

Returning to the performance of the police service, he stressed that you have to know what are your key performance indicators (KPIs) and only when you know this you can do something about it.

He pointed out that under previous Attorney General Anand Ramlogan $137 million was spent on attorneys while under him $6 million was spent in one year on the same number of lawyers.

He said when he entered the ministry, he realised there were no systems in place for tracking what was happening and this leads to the top becoming heavy and the base being disenchanted.

Attempts to contact Acting Commissioner of Police Stephen Williams yesterday on the initiative by the Office of the Attorney General’s were unsuccessful.

In October last year, Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley described the murder detection rate of 10 per cent as “unacceptable”.

In August this year when the murder rate was just over 300, he summoned divisional heads of the Police Service to a meeting at the Diplomatic Centre calling on them to “manage the crime situation”.