Griffith slams ex-magistrate, head of Children's Authority, reporter

Police Commissioner Gary Griffith has responded to criticisms over the police treatment of children found in Sea Lots last week liming at a beach in defiance of stay-at-home orders. He defended the police who ordered the boys to lie face down. In a media release on Monday, Griffith was critical of a newspaper article which featured the opinion of Lucinda Cardenas-Ragoonanan, a former magistrate in the Children’s Court, that the children should not have been treated like criminals.

“One wonders if she ordered police officers to have the handcuffs removed from each one, when they entered her courtroom, and offered them cake and ice cream.

“The comments in this article reek of a person with no knowledge in law enforcement and procedure for an arrest, whereby (sic) they voiced their concern that these individuals should not have been placed on the ground to lie down, because they were children. There were also several adults in the group,” Griffith said.

“The commissioner wonders if this ex-magistrate was expecting that whilst police were involved in an operation, before they placed persons to lie down, that ID cards and dates of birth should have been demanded to verify who should be placed to lie on the ground and who should not.”

He also accused the reporter who wrote the article of taking an anti-police approach and wondered if that reporter and Cardenas-Ragoonanan, “had their way,” if police confronted the juveniles with firearms, they (the juveniles) should have been given ‘milk and cookies.’”

He also criticised Hanif Benjamin, the chairman of the Children’s Authority, saying, “because he obviously did not read the laws or did any research but wanted to jump in to make a comment, he stated that ‘You cannot charge somebody for liming.’”

Griffith said that in confrontations on the field, police are well within their right to order suspects to lie down for their own safety. He also said the actions of the police, in the Sea Lots incident, are necessary to bring order to the situation and insisted the officers would have done the same in any area once people were found breaking the law.

While the police would have been justified in arresting and charging the 27 people found, Griffith said, they were all released once no illegal items were found. Griffith said he is aware of the rights of children, pointing to his setting up the police Child Protection Unit in 2015, while he was national security minister.