Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

The Po­lice Com­plaints Au­thor­i­ty (PCA) has re­ceived 14 re­ports of mis­con­duct against po­lice of­fi­cers since the State of Emer­gency (SoE), was de­clared in this coun­try at the end of last year.

Re­spond­ing to ques­tions from Guardian Me­dia via an email yes­ter­day, the PCA stat­ed that from De­cem­ber 30, 2024 to Jan­u­ary 10, this year, it re­ceived 14 ini­tial re­ports of mis­con­duct by po­lice of­fi­cers while con­duct­ing raids and ex­er­cis­es dur­ing the SoE.

While no fur­ther de­tails on what the na­ture of the com­plaints were, the PCA al­so con­firmed that 12 of these 14 re­ports were con­vert­ed to com­plaints.

Un­der the Emer­gency Pow­ers Reg­u­la­tions, po­lice of­fi­cers have been grant­ed spe­cial pow­ers as part of crime sup­pres­sion ac­tiv­i­ties.

In his con­tri­bu­tion to a de­bate on the ex­ten­sion of the State of Pub­lic Emer­gency, dur­ing a sit­ting of the Low­er House on Mon­day, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley said the pow­ers grant­ed to po­lice were in­tend­ed to en­hance the pace with which they re­spond­ed to sus­pi­cion of crim­i­nal threats.

“I can­not tell you how many lives have been saved, but I know that on that oc­ca­sion the Gov­ern­ment took the ac­tion to give the po­lice and the De­fence Force ad­di­tion­al lee­way.

“I don’t want to tell you the dif­fi­cul­ty some po­lice of­fi­cers have in get­ting a war­rant to go af­ter peo­ple who they be­lieve should be ap­pre­hend­ed in quick or­der.”

Asked if they were con­fi­dent that suf­fi­cient mech­a­nisms were in place to keep the pow­ers of po­lice in check dur­ing the SoE, the PCA not­ed that they were still ca­pa­ble of ad­dress­ing the pub­lic con­cerns even as the Emer­gency Reg­u­la­tions re­mained in ef­fect.

The PCA said it was still com­mit­ted to “ful­fill­ing its man­date with­in the jus­tice process.”

Un­der Sec­tion 20 (2) of the Emer­gency Pow­ers Reg­u­la­tions, mem­bers of the De­fence Force are grant­ed “the pow­ers of a po­lice of­fi­cer”.

The PCA said it “trusts” that the Reg­i­ment was ca­pa­ble of ad­dress­ing any dis­ci­pli­nary mat­ters in­volv­ing sol­diers dur­ing the SoE.