COPS winding way to the top
This column is written following a week of telephone interviews with Gary Griffith, the Commissioner of Police of T&T. However harried, he was unfailingly courteous, returned messages. This is unusual in T&T.
The media are accustomed to public figures who won’t return calls or simply ghost when the questions get difficult. Government ministers etc, don’t see their defection as shameful nor understand they are shirking their duty of care to the public. They wear arrogance like they would stripes of grandeur.
As the week progressed, the original content of our interview was published by other media also seeking answers to the everyday butchery on the streets of this nation. I took another tack and created the following brief narrative of the Police Commissioner of T&T, who has become something of a phenomenon in a country that has had some 10,000 murders in the last 25 years.
You are an only child, a Trinidadian lad, blend of contents, Indian and African and European. You grow up, an only child, in a quiet middle-class neighbourhood. Your parents lived through black power day, and remember Williams saying both “Massa day done” and “the future of the country is in the book bags of children.”
They are convinced of the latter. You are a child of both the best and boom years. Unlike the boys on your streets, whose parents are driving fancy cars, who are proud of their new wealth, who give their sons money to play and party unsupervised, ironically similar to the boys in depressed areas who live and spend for the day, you are almost always under the supervision of an adult pushing you towards the values they have embraced, discipline and excellence.
You get into St Mary’s College, a prestige school for boys. While the boys are on the streets partying you beating books. While they breaking biche, you representing T&T nationally in sport. You learn teamwork, discipline and endurance. You have had a civic sense drummed into you. Not to be self-indulgent, but to serve.
No one is surprised when you get into Sandhurst, among the most prestigious military academies worldwide, joining 55 foreign officers from all around the Commonwealth.
The training in this academy is so gruelling, only seven graduate. You are among them. You do another degree in security in the UK.
Almost immediately on your return, you are thrown into action in the 1990 attempted coup in T&T to ensure democracy is maintained, the rule of law upheld.
You are promoted to captain, you form part of a UN Mission to Haiti and return as the first-ever military officer from this country with a UN Peacekeeping Medal. You enter politics, ultimately serving as national security minister in 2013 under the People’s Partnership. You are keenly aware that between 1999 and 2009, Trinidad’s murder rate has risen nearly 400 per cent; the rate in the capital city of Port-of-Spain rivalled those in Johannesburg and Baghdad. During your tenure 2013-2015, as national security minister, you see reports indicating that state contracts have fed the spiralling murder rate. Your appointment is revoked following a political imbroglio.
By the time you are appointed Commissioner of Police on August 6, 2018, T&T has been named by Business Insider as the 12th most dangerous country in the world with amongst the highest recruits for ISIS in the Western Hemisphere.
You tackle gangs, repeating your request to the State to cut off million-dollar contracts to gang leaders masquerading as community leaders in your effort to stop the cycle of more drugs, more guns, more gangs, more homicides. Despite citizens having little respect for the law and distrust of the police, despite the snail-like pace of the criminal justice system—for the first time in five years, there is a nine per cent decrease in homicides. You are determined to nab the drug lords despite the complicated law around witnesses.
You are assessed not according to merit but around party lines with each decision. You remain steadfast. You believe there is no youth problem in the country, only an adult problem, with parents and guardians who fail to guide their children, who leave them unsupervised, let them grow wild and unprotected from bad influences.
Police Commissioner Griffith is not perfect. He’s rough around the edges. Speaks rapidly. Always moving. He could be wrong about the media at times. He admits he has ADHD but says he uses it to work harder. He’s solid, he wants to serve. He’s reducing homicide and after long days, he is heroic, a bright light in this country that has been rapidly losing its way.