Illegal police process

ANOTHER blow to the police came on February 18 with the damning findings of a High Court judge who ruled that a promotion process affecting 169 senior cops must be quashed and restarted.

Ruling in a lawsuit brought last year, Justice Frank Seepersad criticised suspended top cop Erla Harewood-Christopher and declared, “The events which occurred in this case should signal an alarm as there is an evident administrative crisis in the TTPS.”

“Every restrictive regulatory requirement of the promotion process, as imposed by Parliament, was disregarded and no procedural step can now be initiated to cure the defects and illegality which ensued.”

It was only on January 28, in what turned out to be one of her last official appearances, that Ms Harewood-Christopher presided over a promotion ceremony for 81 officers, including four inspectors, at Police Administration Building, Port of Spain.

However, she is merely the latest face of a problem going back decades, affecting not hundreds but thousands of officers at multiple levels of the police hierarchy.

There have been so many complaints – revolving around delays, the failure of assessment panels to sit, questionable merit lists, marking scheme inconsistencies, bias at interviews, dubious committee qualifications, conflicts of interests, blanket appraisals, “errors,” the use of consultants and a backlog going back to 2007 – that Ms Harewood-Christopher’s predecessors McDonald Jacob, Gary Griffith and Stephen Williams all faced legal action.

While she was once in charge of administration in a lower post, the problem is larger than her.

This must be fixed.

Adding a disturbing layer to the judge’s findings in this latest case is the way officers administered the court proceedings, with Justice Seepersad noting, “Far too often, deliberate and calculated attempts are made to obfuscate the truth as missteps are rarely ever owned or acknowledged.”

Ultimately, it is the constitutional power of a top cop that is the source of those missteps.

A commissioner of police has “the complete power to manage the police.”

Yet, this should be exercised in a way “to ensure that the human, financial and material resources available to the service are used in an efficient and effective manner.” Not only should regulations be followed, but there should be fairness.

But the gross procedural defects glimpsed in this claim, identified by the judge as amounting to irrationality, suggest such is not happening. One can only imagine the impact on morale. Officers near retirement have been caught up. Suspicion of wrongdoing is high.

It is a shame that time must now be wasted on cleaning up what is, ultimately, an administrative mess.

This is the last thing officers should have to contend with when, ahead of Carnival and amid a state of emergency, they should be keeping citizens safe.

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