Dear Editor

WITH a La Penitence Market vendor being shot to his head on Easter Monday, reportedly while trying to ward off four bandits from robbing his wife as stated in the press, whilst a company of unarmed and hapless city constables screamed for help, speaks volumes of the profound mismanagement of the Georgetown municipality.

What is the use of deploying unarmed city constables in the city? It shows a clear lack of trust and respect for their officers that they are not allowed to carry firearms. What is the City Constabulary doing with the firearms in their possession? Only making them available to the bodyguards and residential security that protect the King and Queen of the city?

Just look at the City Constabulary training complex on Water Street, which is in total ruins, but which was supposed to have been rehabilitated since 2016, with a promise that emphasis would have been placed on recruitment and training. One could have only hoped that this facility would have been used to provide police self-defence training to their recruits as a vital component of The Basic Recruitment Course. As a matter of fact, in order to be prepared for today’s dangerous and unpredictable world, city constables need to learn self-defence for both armed and unarmed encounters.

And what about the promise that they would have been sending batches of ranks for overseas training? Was this just another pie-in-the-sky pipe dream by the town clerk? Or are all of the overseas trips reserved for the King, the Queen and their chosen few?

Arming the city police would be an effective deterrent to criminal behaviour in the markets and around Georgetown; most cities in Europe and North America routinely arm their police officers, in part to deter criminal acts. Armed criminals operate in many wards of our capital. Given this, a failure to routinely arm the city police gives armed criminals a strong advantage in terms of their ability to threaten and commit violence without any corresponding risk to themselves.
Is it not time for the City Council’s Legal Affairs and Security Committee to make this rag tag, disrespected, poorly trained, poorly uniformed outfit into a professional, effective and esteemed police force?

Regards

Modi Sankar