COP: Contradictory statements ‘cause for alarm’

POLICE Commissioner Gary Griffith is expected to meet Finance Minister Colm Imbert on Monday.

Griffith told Newsday yesterday they will discuss the issue of money for the police service. This comes after Griffith, at the Parliament’s Public Administration and Appropriations Committee (PAAC) meeting last Thursday, reported that the police had not received any funding other than officers’ salaries for the 2018-2019 fiscal year. This resulted in the police service being unable to meet other expenses during that period.

Griffith was quoted in the Newsday on Saturday, as saying: “What I am trying to get now is $47 million to pay off bills that the TTPS owes debtors, approved in fiscal 2017-18. I have not even started getting funds for 2018-2019.”

It was also reported in January, after a Newsday article about the police service running out of money, that the Finance Ministry said it received a request for $80 million from the commissioner and had released $20 million for equipment, material, services and supplies.

The Newsday article on Saturday said a further $20 million was reportedly scheduled to be released for that purpose in the following next two weeks and a balance of $40 million in February.

At the PAAC meeting, Griffith acknowledged receipt of the $20 million for projects including tasers, vehicles and new uniforms. He said he had to take from the $20 million to offset debts to vendors.

Imbert said $1 billion was given to the police service to meet their debts, but Griffith said there was a slight confusion in the figures. He said out of the $1 billion, $850,000,000 was allocated for salaries and the balance went towards paying off debts from the previous year.

Adding its voice to the issue in a press release yesterday, was the Congress of the People (COP). The party said the “contradictory statements” by Imbert and Griffith “is indeed cause for alarm”.

The party has called for Imbert, Griffith and National Security Minister Stuart Young to “immediately provide the necessary clarifications in the public interest, not only as to how these public funds were utilised, but if they were disbursed in accordance with the budgetary allocations for the current fiscal year”.

The COP said modernisation of the police service is urgently needed to re-engineer processes and systems that will accommodate best practices emerging globally, and to embrace technology-enabled solutions.

“This will ultimately lead to the intelligence-led policing passionately advocated for by the (Commissioner).”

The party said the transformation thrust is “urgently required” for the police service to comply with the new initiatives and procedures arising out of the recently introduced Criminal Procedure Rules.

These rules, it added, were “designed to eliminate protracted delays and unnecessary wastage of state resources, while still adhering to the overriding objective of achieving swift justice without compromise of due process.”