CoP lauds 'responsible' limited Carnival-type events

Police Commissioner Gary Griffith has said while the police received numerous reports of planned pre-Carnival activities over the weekend and into Monday, many of them were cancelled or never took place.

In a phone interview on Monday, Griffith said this showed a “great degree of responsibility by the country.”

He said many of the planned activities be it fetes, blockoramas and/or J’Ouvert events, were almost all cancelled or never took place and there were one or two isolated events.

“But by and large, it showed, again, the great degree of responsibility by the country. Even though many people were planning to act in such a manner it was very limited.”

Griffith said this made life easy for the police. But he added that they would continue to monitor the situation tonight into Tuesday.

Videos of J'Ouvert-like celebrations made the rounds on social media on Monday. Griffith also said these videos were largely from last year.

“There may have been one or two, but in the scheme of things, when you have a country of this size, when you have one or two situations, it is virtually a drop in the bucket in comparison to what we may have anticipated and expected.

“We are still looking at those areas and we are still looking at some of the video footage that was sent through social media. But several of these we have seen are actually situations of J’Ouvert activities from last year,” Griffith said.

Griffith said what the police were getting a lot of reports about were planned vigils and protests over the unfortunate murder of Andrea Bharatt.