Diana Mahabir Wyatt

What with the budget speech looming, the costs of supporting the country’s infrastructure will be front and centre.

Among the issues of most concern for citizens are crime, which threatens us all, and corruption in public office.

We are told the police service employs some 8,000 people, if one can trust the numbers recently disclosed in the media. We are also told the police service is their employer, albeit one perhaps operating under some different constraints.

When a previous commissioner of police (CoP) was asked why he had not terminated officers who were notorious for demanding money for favours, or favours for looking the other way, he famously was quoted as saying with a shrug: "Those guys have guns."

That was then. Now it seems that private-sector managers are carrying as well, at least if they have a modest $30,000-$40,000 to spare. So the reappointment of a CoP who for trying to stop the police service from being used for private profit is being challenged.

The grounds of the challenge include: "Why can’t we follow what is done in the US?" – where anyone can buy and carry a weapon, even to religious services, and as a result, mass murders are not uncommon – there have been 163 over the past three decades, 34 of them in schools, including primary schools, killing 648 people, done by anyone who could buy a gun.

There are also challenges by people here quarrelling over whether the recruitment procedures for a CoP are in accordance with “protocol.” An old lawyers’ trick, to stymie a conviction by picking on an issue, however tiny, to try to invalidate proceedings.

It is used in industrial relations as well, where a disciplinary case over theft is excused not because the theft did not take place, but because the correct disciplinary process was not followed exactly. A document was signed by the wrong person, a letter was not opened by the person it was addressed to, the wrong union official was present at the in-company disciplinary hearing before the dismissal took place, making the process “unlawful” – that kind of thing.

[caption id="attachment_914670" align="alignnone" width="683"] Inland Revenue Division, Ministry of Finance, Wrightson Road, Port of Spain. File photo/Jeff K Mayers. -[/caption]

Most of the rest of the population, who are not in danger of being exposed for illegal activities, are just saying, "For goodness’ sake, put him back and get on with it. He is the only CoP for decades to actually try to clean up the corruption in the TTPS.” He has actually terminated the employment of corrupt officers! Randy must be turning in his grave. As town says, any such reappointment in the TTPS will be hotly challenged by anyone who has cocoa in the sun.

It is a lesson in Trini culture, not only in the bubble of the public service, where discipline, production and tolerance are for the top 15 per cent. Even the new minister of national security claimed this week that only 40 per cent of the pol