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“The question is whether any government has the political willpower to effect the necessary changes to make the Police Service efficient. I am not optimistic about an answer in the affirmative because the scale of systemic neglect extends to the health services and social care as well as environmental management and traffic management systems and a whole lot more.”
The following Letter to the Editor, which deals with an apparent serious shortcoming in the way the Service Commissions function, was submitted to Wired868 by Mohan Ramcharan of Birmingham, England.
(Copyright Trinidad Guardian)
The Trinidad Express of 8 January, 2018 quoted DCP Deodat Dulalchan as saying that the Police Service needs some 1,100 officers. This astonishing statistic is actually dwarfed by Colm Imbert’s announcement in 2011 that the country was short of some 2,400 medical appointees (reported by Anna Ramdass in the Express in February 2011).
My astonishment isn’t simply that Dulalchan’s figures are high. These sorts of numbers just don’t arise overnight. The powers-that-be appear to have been caught with their pants down. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that the likes of Dulalchan and Imbert took their pants down in seeming acts of ‘transparency.’
I submit that chronic and systemic neglect is a normative position held by succeeding administrations.
Let me start at the top. It is the President who is responsible for appointing persons to the various Commissions which, in turn, are responsible for appointments downstream. The failure to appoint a full Police Service Commission (PSC) in the past year leads us to see how systemic neglect arises. The unsatisfactory state of the current PSC, which is without a full complement of commissioners, is shown by the revelations during the recent search for a police commissioner.
The question is whether any government has the political willpower to effect the necessary changes to make the Police Service efficient. I am not optimistic about an answer in the affirmative because the scale of systemic neglect extends to the health services and social care as well as environmental management and traffic management systems and a whole lot more.
(Courtesy Annalisa Caruth/Wired868)
I conclude that there is something fundamentally wrong with successive governments; they appear to be afflicted with some terrible disease. By analogy, any individual so terribly ill would be in urgent need of intensive care.
What, to reiterate my point, has Imbert’s Government done to address the shortage of medical personnel, given that seven years have passed since the problem was identified? Aren’t they in charge now?
I seem to remember Shamfa making that clear early ‘o’clock!
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Mohan Ramcharan is a Trinidadian living in England, an LLB (Hons) law graduate, systems thinking practitioner, and critical thinker. He is a product of two cultures and strives to be ethical and impartial in his thoughts and actions.
Interesting…but the problems remain. Suggest walking with a solution when offering opinions