What the CoP must address

THE EDITOR: Thursday’s news stories highlight the new CoP confirming that there will be a thorough and robust assessment of all applicants for firearm licences.

This begs the question: what was the status quo before? A less than thorough and robust assessment, perhaps? Or was it just simply "pay to play" as so many commentators strongly suggest?

Now, what I would like to hear more often from the CoP is that there will be a thorough and robust assessment of the movements of all gang members as we move swiftly to shut down all their activities.

Also, why do we require a complement of nearly 8,000 police officers in a relatively small country with a population of 1.4 million citizens? That works out to one police officer for every 175 people.

Some of us may be interested to know that in Denmark there is no need for a single officer in towns of 25,000 people or less. I know this because I visited a town there called Skagen, which is on the Baltic Sea and where the nearest police presence is 35 minutes away and everything works fine there.

We would supposedly need 142 officers in a town of 25,000 people in Trinidad, plus hundreds of other private security guards. Seems we urgently need to find out why we have become so criminal-minded.

GREGORY WIGHT

Maraval