KAY-MARIE FLETCH­ER

Se­nior Re­porter

kay-marie.fletch­er@guardian.cot.tt

The Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sion (PolSC) has com­mit­ted to en­sur­ing ac­count­abil­i­ty with­in the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) un­der its new lead­er­ship. PolSC Chair­man Dr Wen­dell Wal­lace stat­ed that one of his key pri­or­i­ties will be work­ing close­ly with Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Er­la Hare­wood-Christo­pher to ad­dress the TTPS’s da­ta de­fi­cien­cies and the grow­ing ero­sion of pub­lic trust. On Fri­day, Dr Wal­lace told Guardian Me­dia, “One of the things that, as the chair­man, I in­tend to do is work with the team to en­sure that the po­lice ser­vice is ful­ly func­tion­ing. One of the things that I in­tend to do is work with the com­mis­sion­er to en­sure that you have a trick­le-down ef­fect. For ex­am­ple, I would like to see greater ac­count­abil­i­ty.”

Speak­ing on the case dis­missal of po­lice of­fi­cers charged with ex­tor­tion, Dr Wal­lace said he will be work­ing with Hare­wood-Christo­pher to en­sure files are sub­mit­ted on time.

“One of the things I in­tend to do is to push for the (TTPS) ex­ec­u­tive to get the mes­sage that you need to en­sure that those un­der your ju­ris­dic­tion do things in line with polic­ing. Cer­tain­ly, I can’t un­der­stand why a file has to take so long to get to the DPP (Di­rec­tor of Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tions), so the team will be work­ing close­ly with the com­mis­sion­er to en­sure that these files are sub­mit­ted on time. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, you want to en­sure that there’s some lev­el of ac­count­abil­i­ty for those who run afoul of the law. Those po­lice of­fi­cers who fail to sub­mit files on time and fail to live up to the man­date of polic­ing,” he added.

While he’s yet to re­view the lat­est Pub­lic Trust, Con­fi­dence and Sat­is­fac­tion Sur­vey, Dr Wal­lace said he took a look at last year’s re­port. He said while it was good, more could be done.

Dr Wal­lace said, “You want to know what the peo­ple in To­ba­go think about polic­ing and not just Trinidad and To­ba­go. You want to break it down in­to nar­row­ing ar­eas, and that’s one of the ar­eas that I in­tend to work on. I am a re­searcher, and I want da­ta to ac­tu­al­ly be able to show how well the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice is func­tion­ing.

“You need to nar­row it down to what per­sons in the Port-of-Spain di­vi­sion, what per­sons in the South­west­ern di­vi­sion think. We need to bring it a lit­tle bit clos­er. You need to know the views of males against fe­males. Fe­males would have a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive than males. You need to un­der­stand the per­spec­tive of the younger pop­u­la­tion against per­sons like me who are of a dif­fer­ent vin­tage. These are some of the things that I in­tend to bring to the Com­mis­sion.”

And amid con­tin­u­ous pub­lic con­cerns about the po­lice and the coun­try’s crime sit­u­a­tion, Dr Wal­lace said the TTPS ex­ec­u­tive must work to build the pub­lic’s trust.