Stephon Nicholas

To­ba­go Cor­re­spon­dent

To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) Chief Sec­re­tary Far­ley Au­gus­tine said the three new po­lice posts in To­ba­go will be ful­ly op­er­a­tional with­in a week.

Au­gus­tine gave the up­date on Mon­day while speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia fol­low­ing his toast to the na­tion at the Shaw Park Com­plex, Scar­bor­ough.

Con­struc­tion on the fa­cil­i­ties at Sig­nal Hill, Ply­mouth and Good­wood be­gan on Fri­day as the Gov­ern­ment seeks to ex­tend the arm of law en­force­ment in­to com­mu­ni­ties. The ini­tia­tive is part of a na­tion­al roll­out of 30 po­lice posts and is in­tend­ed to im­prove the re­sponse times of se­cu­ri­ty ser­vices to var­i­ous emer­gen­cies.

As To­ba­go cel­e­brat­ed 64 years of In­de­pen­dence, Au­gus­tine said cit­i­zens can­not tru­ly be free while liv­ing in fear of crim­i­nals.

“We can­not be sat­is­fied while crime steals lives and re­quires fam­i­lies to re­treat be­hind bur­glar proof­ing and locked gates,” he said.

There have been a num­ber of rob­beries on the is­land re­cent­ly, which have caught the at­ten­tion of au­thor­i­ties.

Res­i­dents of the var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ties have wel­comed the posts, hop­ing the clos­er pres­ence of law en­force­ment will de­ter crim­i­nals.

Mean­while, Se­nior Su­per­in­ten­dent Rod­hil Kirk praised To­bag­o­ni­ans for co­op­er­at­ing with po­lice. He not­ed that their sup­port has led to a num­ber of ar­rests re­cent­ly and the seizure of more than $1.1 mil­lion worth of mar­i­jua­na in a raid in Canaan.

“One of our strate­gic goals is com­mu­ni­ty part­ner­ship, and we have been do­ing that. It has been work­ing. The pub­lic seems to have the con­fi­dence in us to share that in­for­ma­tion,” he said.

Kirk as­sured the pub­lic that the TTPS would act ex­pe­di­tious­ly on all cred­i­ble in­tel­li­gence to stamp out crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty and cre­ate a safer en­vi­ron­ment.

“When you see some­thing, say some­thing. As long as the in­fo comes to us, we will act on it with thor­ough­ness and quick re­sponse.”

Kirk al­so hailed his of­fi­cers for en­sur­ing safe In­de­pen­dence cel­e­bra­tions, adding that var­i­ous state agen­cies were en­gaged to co­or­di­nate and ex­e­cute their plans. He said height­ened vis­i­bil­i­ty was part of the strat­e­gy.