(Trinidad Express) The performance of Commissioner of Police Dwayne Gibbs came under severe fire from Opposition Leader Dr Keith Rowley in the House of Representatives yesterday.
A red-faced Gibbs was seated in the VIP gallery, diagonally opposite to Rowley, as the Opposition Leader declared that his post was redundant as far as he was concerned because Gibbs had brought nothing to the table.
“If when we objected (to the foreigner Police Commissioner) we were told that what the foreign Police Commissioner would have brought is a state of emergency, then the country would have known that we don’t need a foreign Police Commissioner to police us under a state of emergency,” he said to desk thumping support.
“Today I am saying that we have paid our Commissioner of Police to bring something here to us in Trinidad and Tobago, we have paid Deputy Commissioner Ewatski to bring something to us…in this moment of emergency they have brought absolutely nothing to the table…There has been no new input into the crime fighting by the foreign importation of these men. None! What we have is a state of emergency and this Commissioner of Police is a spokesperson for the government people who are now talking about how many guns they pick up, how many people on warrants, PR! That is not what we expected from a high-priced foreign Police Commissioner!” Rowley said.
Rowley said the expectation was to have modern policing a cut above anything present in Trinidad and Tobago. Instead of that, the country had a State of Emergency in which “what we are seeing is policing by press conference and we paying one million dollar a year for that”.
He said Government had promised that a foreign Commissioner was going to buy a whole batch of goodies. Yet , he said while there was a spike in crime, people massacred in Arima, Gibbs left the country the day after. “If it was so serious to warrant suspension of our rights and freedoms…why was the Commissioner of Police allowed to leave the country? The two things can’t be right. It is either it was not viewed as serious or the Commissioner of Police was irresponsible,” he said. Rowley asked where was Deputy Commissioner Ewatski. “As I speak to you now I don’t know where he is…So while we are under a State of Emergency, under curfew, the second most senior officer, who we have paid handsomely, way above market rates, (is missing) ,” he said.
Rowley said when he was returning from Tobago on the Tuesday after the State of Emergency was declared he saw a whole brigade of police officers going to New York to play sports. “What kind of State of Emergency you could have where you don’t call back every policeman to his post to police the country, if it is so serious and dangerous and this crisis you averted, that you (National Security Minister Sandy) would not tell us what it is…But off to New York goes a police football team, a police athletic team, a police basketball team and a police shooting team,” he said. Rowley said the police did very well in New York.
“I think they won the march past,” he said, causing laughter on the PNM bench.
