Trinidad Top Cop: UK training to help prosecute criminals

(Trinidad Guardian) A new colour-cod­ed threat alert sys­tem and train­ing for po­lice of­fi­cers to pros­e­cute cas­es are some of the im­me­di­ate out­comes of a week-long vis­it to the Unit­ed King­dom by Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Gary Grif­fith.

Grif­fith en­gaged in “sev­er­al meet­ings with law en­force­ment of­fi­cials from vary­ing de­part­ments,” ac­cord­ing to a state­ment on his In­sta­gram Page.

Grif­fith, along with Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young, and Chief of De­fence Staff Hay­den Pritchard met with of­fi­cials from Scot­land Yard, the Joint Ter­ror­ism Analy­sis Cen­tre, the Na­tion­al Cy­ber Crime Cen­tre, Met­ro­pol­i­tan Po­lice Train­ing Fa­cil­i­ty among oth­er agen­cies.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia from the UK on Mon­day, Com­mis­sion­er Grif­fith says some of the re­sults from the trip would be seen in as lit­tle as three weeks.

Ac­cord­ing to Grif­fith, a colour-cod­ed threat alert sys­tem will be im­ple­ment­ed with­in the Po­lice Ser­vice “hope­ful­ly” in about three weeks. The lev­els will be green, am­ber, red and black. The lev­els will in­crease based on in­for­ma­tion re­ceived from T&T’s in­tel­li­gence agen­cies.

“You will no longer be hear­ing about per­sons claim­ing that they in­tend to beef up se­cu­ri­ty,” he said. “We do not work in an abat­toir to beef up se­cu­ri­ty.”

Grif­fith says there are im­me­di­ate ben­e­fits to this, as “each and every po­lice of­fi­cer, every di­vi­sion will be aware of their role and func­tion based on the es­ca­la­tion of the threat and colour code.”

Grif­fith be­lieves this will en­sure max­i­mum ef­fec­tive­ness with­in the ser­vice.

A Unit­ed King­dom team will al­so ar­rive in a few weeks to train lo­cal po­lice pros­e­cu­tors to plug “sev­er­al loop­holes” that al­low crim­i­nals to es­cape jus­tice.

Grif­fith ad­mits that mis­takes have been made, but he says he will utilise the ex­per­tise of this team “to as­sist” in en­sur­ing that cas­es are air-tight.

The team which will be con­tract­ed will help the TTPS “go through the sys­tem prop­er­ly, ac­cu­rate­ly and en­sure there are no loop­holes and win­dows of op­por­tu­ni­ty” for al­leged crim­i­nals.

While he says the TTPS is deal­ing with law en­force­ment, he says they must al­so deal with how cas­es are pros­e­cut­ed to elim­i­nate “op­por­tu­ni­ty for per­sons to beat the sys­tem.”

The Com­mis­sion­er al­so aims to es­tab­lish a spe­cial counter-ter­ror­ism unit aris­ing out of his vis­it to the UK.