Police are being made scapegoats

THE EDITOR: It may or may not be surprising to see this kind of behaviour from the residents in and around Port of Spain. I think there are a mixture of reasons for this. The police are being used as the scapegoats in this entire situation. They are being used to treat with every ill that faces these so-called protesters.

The reasons are:

1. Historically there have been a lack of self-development, community development and meaningful employment opportunities among the people of those areas. Successive governments have miserably failed those people.

2. The intellectuals who appear on radio, television, newspapers and social media when there’s a crisis like now have failed those people. Even those intellectuals who like to boast that they have achieved despite being born and grown in those areas, never mention that they moved out and allowed those who remained to continue in a state of little or no mental growth and stability.

3. The lawyers, engineers, building contractors, agricultural officers, doctors, teachers, politicians, university lecturers, psychologists and other business people never got together to create the kinds of programmes to help develop those people and their communities successfully. Not forgetting the religious leaders.

4. The politicians continue to use those people every five years as their personal voting bank, then turn their backs on them until it’s election time again.

5. Have the Members of Parliament and councillors for those areas gone and spoken to the people there since Saturday?

6. Have the Prime Minister reached out to them?

Therefore the police are practically called upon to mitigate and solve all those things that are not being done by the leaders of all the institutions and departments of this country and the police are not equipped for that, they were not trained for that. That’s not their role and function but they go to primary and secondary schools and host community meetings and lecture to those people. They are the most visible department in every community.

The others are intellectually dishonest, intellectually negligent, intellectually criminal.

They never condemn those who cover their faces and rob supermarkets and other businesses, people in the street and in their homes, at gunpoint. But when they are confronted by the police and they lose their lives, the so-called intellectuals refer to them as “poor black people” and the police are the ones doing the oppression.

Stop blaming the police, they are not the ones who have failed. They are being asked to right all the wrongs of our country and it is not their role and function to do so.

WINSTON C HACKETT

via e-mail