Sturge: Rogue cops part of crime problem

Toco/Sangre Grande United National Congress (UNC) candidate Wayne Sturge said rogue police officers are part of Trinidad and Tobago’s crime problem.

At a UNC media briefing on January 19, Sturge and Barataria/San Juan MP Saddam Hosein addressed several matters, including crime, the sale of Petrotrin and the state of emergency (SoE).

Sturge said TT needed more effective crime-prevention tools, especially when there was an “abysmal” conviction rate.

“We have not addressed an issue which is at the forefront of many people – why are so many police officers before the courts?

“Why are so many members of our protective services before the courts?”

Sturge said crime could not flourish without the involvement of members of the protective services.

“Whilst most police officers are well-intentioned, hard-working and honest, there is an unacceptable percentile of police officers who are facilitating criminal conduct, facilitating criminal gangs and providing support.”

He said it took only an "ounce of common sense" to know why there were so many unsolved assassinations.

“It does not take a rocket scientist to know how to fix it. We intend to fix it.”

Apart from rogue police, Sturge said TT’s current educational model contributed to the problem.

He described the model as “down-right anachronistic (belonging to another period), irrelevant, disempowering,” and the reason for many disenfranchised youth.

The current system had set many of TT’s young men up for failure and many of them ended up in funeral homes or in the criminal justice system.

“Many of them start off, simply, as first-time offenders, and by the time they leave the prisons, heads of gangs and it goes on and on.”

He said, in the last ten years there were no opportunities, options or hope for TT’s youth.

The social services system was another way of dealing with crime in the long term.

The country’s most vulnerable citizens were not being reached through the current system, he added.

“This system where those most vulnerable, for instance, must leave Toco and they live on $20 or $40 a day and try to access grants in Sangre Grande, only then to be told by a public servant, ‘You need to get this document and that document, which pushes the remedy further down the road.

“And when someone has to spend $20 in transport from Toco to Sangre Grande and then not get what they went for, then do you really expect them to take the chance to come back again?”

Sturge said there should be a system where teachers became the “front line” of social services in schools.

“You must have a system where teachers can liaise directly with social workers assigned to the schools and where the social worker is the middle man who ensures that what is needed – whether it is work supervision, the student not having books, not having shoes or uniforms or whatever is disrupting the student at home – these things are fixed.”

Sturge said the constituency of Toco/Sangre Grande has contributed so much to TT yet received very little in return. He described it as one of TT’s poorest constituencies and said he intended to fix that.

Sturge said the same way he left school with zero passes but had the opportunity to turn it all around, he planned to share his formula with Toco/Sangre Grande's youth, showing them they could be equal to or better than youth in Westmoorings affluent areas.

Asked about comments made by the Prime Minister about some police officers closing the stations at night to hide from criminals, Sturge said the day before Dr Rowley made those comments, National Security Minister Fitzgerald Hinds had said criminals were running in fear.

“It is amazing the next day the Prime Minister was saying the police were hiding and cowering in fear.”

Sturge said to address the problem of rogue police, there has to be an increase in penalties, but also better detection.

“If you have a Professional Bureau of Standards (PSB) staffed with local police officers, do you really think that things can be kept secret? There are ways in which people are alerted. PSB investigates police officers.

“I have seen instances where officers of PSB notified people who they say were their batch, and if they do that, they, in essence, frustrate the process.”

Sturge said people from “outside” were needed. He then referenced former Canadian-born police and deputy police commissioners Dwayne Gibbs and Jack Ewatski.

“You need to have people who have no connections to the local police,” Sturge said about possible solutions.

Hosein said the party also planned to introduce specialised courts to deal with these matters quickly.