Po­lice So­cial Wel­fare As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent, ASP Ish­mael Pitt, says po­lice of­fi­cers have been work­ing con­tin­u­ous­ly with lit­tle re­lief since the 2024 State of Emer­gency (SoE) was de­clared by the pre­vi­ous gov­ern­ment.

Speak­ing on CNC3’s The Morn­ing Brew yes­ter­day, Pitt said the de­mands on of­fi­cers have in­ten­si­fied since then, with suc­ces­sive events of na­tion­al con­cern re­quir­ing full mo­bil­i­sa­tion of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS), in­clud­ing the re­cent­ly ex­tend­ed SoE.

He said of­fi­cers al­so car­ried the bur­den of polic­ing Car­ni­val ear­li­er this year, the gen­er­al elec­tion, the cur­rent Christ­mas sea­son and prepa­ra­tions for Car­ni­val again ear­ly next year, all while leave re­mains re­strict­ed.

“It’s so much,” Pitt said.

He said the sus­tained op­er­a­tional tem­po is plac­ing of­fi­cers at se­ri­ous risk of burnout, with lim­it­ed op­por­tu­ni­ty to achieve work-life bal­ance.

“Leave has been re­strict­ed...the ques­tion is how are you now able to ex­er­cise that work-life bal­ance, and it is dif­fi­cult at this point in time con­sid­er­ing the lev­els of re­stric­tion,” Pitt said.

He said while of­fi­cers can ap­ply for leave when they feel over­whelmed, ap­proval is not guar­an­teed.

“If that leave is not grant­ed, it means to say that the po­lice of­fi­cer has to con­tin­ue to per­form,” he said. “The ques­tion – is the po­lice of­fi­cer per­form­ing in a suf­fi­cient frame of mind or with the ca­pac­i­ty at that point in time in or­der to ex­hib­it that lev­el of polic­ing that is in keep­ing with mod­ern stan­dards?”

Pitt al­so raised con­cerns about ac­count­abil­i­ty, ques­tion­ing how of­fi­cers would be judged if mis­takes oc­curred af­ter leave re­quests are de­nied.

“If a mis­take is made, then what stan­dard is the po­lice of­fi­cer go­ing to be judged by, con­sid­er­ing that he or she ap­plied for leave and they were de­nied?” he said.

He said the as­so­ci­a­tion con­sid­ers the is­sue a sig­nif­i­cant con­cern and plans to con­tin­ue ad­vo­cat­ing for clos­er scruti­ny of leave poli­cies and of­fi­cer wel­fare.

“We are go­ing to be ad­vo­cat­ing that it is prop­er­ly well scru­ti­nised and analysed so that we en­sure that our of­fi­cers have the ap­pro­pri­ate in­ter­ven­tion pro­vid­ed with the ap­pro­pri­ate amount of leave when such in­ter­ven­tion and leave is re­quired,” Pitt said.

He added that while polic­ing stan­dards re­main high, of­fi­cer well­be­ing must be treat­ed as es­sen­tial to ef­fec­tive and mod­ern polic­ing.