Strange Happenings

I am awake at 1:00 a.m. in the morning. This is normal for me because I usually go to bed early and then get up at these hours like a jumbie. In moving around my house I noticed that there was some abnormal vehicular activity on my street. Some people may say that I am a maco, others may say I am damn fas, however I consider myself to be hyper observant. Just as I was about to call the police I saw blue flashing lights, but I was still a bit uneasy. So I continued to pace around the house. Next thing my gate bell rings, I look out and see police. It was the kind of police I like too, the ones that breastfed on dasheen and look like they could buss somebody ass. The officers told me they would like to come in to check the premises and I quickly obliged. The officer who stood with me while his colleagues checked the premises explained that there was an incident on the highway involving a stolen vehicle and the suspects shot at the police. He asked me if I saw anything unusual, so I explained that I was going to call the police earlier. The officers completed the search then instructed me to lock up and proceeded down the street to continue the search.

This incident led me to a broadcast I received from some fool earlier that same night. “Big exercise in curepe on the main road side at least 40 cops searching cars .” As civilians we are not privy to the rationale behind the operations of law enforcement agencies. Why would we want to assist criminals by sending these types of messages? Some of us have persons on our Facebook and BBM accounts that we barely know and it is difficult to control where this information ends up. When we circulate these stupid messages we make the work of the officers futile. This is something that i have written about before in a post entitled “Aiding and Abetting the Criminal Element” so I will not babble on because my feelings are still the same.

I must say that I found the officers to be quite polite considering the circumstances and I was really impressed with the way they operated overall. I just hope that the officers were either able to apprehend the suspects or to at least survive the night without injury.

Aiding and Abetting the Criminal Element

I received a message via Blackberry Instant Messenger recently that was quite disturbing. I had previously spoken about this application concerning matters of the heart. Now I want to address matters relating to crime. It has become popular now for people to send broadcasts messages via BBIM. These messages range from stolen items to fete and club promotions to protest on the Beetham. My issue is when the messages involve the activities of the police. The message I received and I quote “Police road block on the bus route by aranguez savanah”. It is a quote so I had to spell Arranguez and Savannah wrong. The average citizen usually does not know the reason for a road block simply because the police do not need to indicate the purpose of a road block. Even if the road block is routine and they are not looking for anybody in particular the point is to catch people who break the law. That is the job of the police which would assist in them achieving their mandate of protecting and serving. Why would you want to alert people of this activity? Is it that we as Trinidadians are friendly with criminals and we want to help them avoid the police?

There are several implications of this activity that we often do not consider. The first is that supposed there is a rapist driving along his merry way. This person has gone undetected for several years, however his insurance happens to be expired. Stopped in the seemingly innocent road block he is apprehended and taken to the station where he is charged and his fingerprints taken. These fingerprints then happen to match a series of rapes in East Trinidad. Would the rapist have been caught if he was alerted to the road block in advance? Now don’t in your mind say this scenario is farfetched because the point is that we should not circulate this type of information as the only people who benefit from this are law breakers. We do not know where this information would end up. We do not know the motives of many of the people around us. The police already have a difficult time staying ahead of criminals who do not have rules, regulations and laws that govern their operations. Please I am begging everybody to be responsible in the information that we disseminate. Once the information leaves us we have no control over where it would end up. Finally people should question the type of friends they have that would benefit from receiving a message of that nature and possible have a chat with the person about their illegal behaviour or distance themselves from the person.

Needless to say the person who sent me the message to me got an earful. Admittedly she was not aware of the implication of transmitting the message. So my friends fix the ME in criME and stop making the work of the police more difficult.

Hard working Police Officers Raid Beetham Gardens

This morning the traffic was moving slower than usual approaching the Beetham on the highway. As I got closer I realized the cause of the traffic. Apparently police and other law enforcement agencies were conducting a raid on the Beetham. But oh gosh boy. Trinis fas!! Because people slowing down to watch the scene. Because there were a lot of police vehicles both marked and unmarked more than fifteen including one of those twenty-five seater busses. Being the true Trini that I am I was also slowing down to watch, of course only because the cars in front of me were slowing down.

This is what I like to see police in large numbers working to fight crime. I also saw quite a few of the police officers that I like the big gunta ones that look like they breast feed on dasheen. I don’t like nashy police at all, the hungry looking ones. I find they should put the hungry looking ones to protect the President, Prime Minister, Attorney General and the like.

We must admit however that police work is hard work that many of us are not willing to do ourselves or even allow our children to do. How many of us are willing to go into the Beetham to look for criminals. I don’t even like driving past the Beetham. I commend the hard working officers who this morning left their families early or maybe were not even with their families for the Republic day holiday to show up knocking on doors before the crack of dawn. Hopefully some significant arrests were made. The sad thing though is that after the officers work hard in this raid some Magistrate would give these bastards bail to go back on the street. But at least the gremlins would be off the street for the weekend. I will definitely be on the lookout for stories of this raid in the news.

Police and their hidden Guns

Sometime ago a story broke in the local media that a cache with arms, ammunition and narcotics was found the ceiling of the St. Joseph Station. Like most people I was appalled at this find and wondered what the officers were thinking. I also wondered what they were going to do with the items. Why were the items being stored, and of all places in the station. Following the daily updates on this interesting story I remembered that there had been a raid in Bangladesh (which is the settlement between Curepe Secondary and WASA on the Priority Bus Route) a few months ago. It was reported in the news that a raid was carried out in Bangladesh and it was apparent to law enforcement officials that the residents and targets of the raid were aware that the raid was going to take place. Upon investigation it was found that a call was placed from the St. Joseph Police Station to someone in the area and it was believed to be the tip off.

If an investigation was conducted and it determined that the tip off call came from the St. Joseph Police Station it means that somebody watching and monitoring the Station. Therefore it would only be a matter of time before there was a raid on the station. If I had things hidden in a cache in the ceiling I would get rid of it and go on leave, get swine flu or something to absent myself from that whole scenario. But I guess common sense not so common and thank God for that. Now it could have been that the officers thought that someone would have afforded them the same courtesy and give them a tip off. Or they just thought that nothing would be done to investigate the station further.

As to what the items were being stored for I am not sure but there are several options. The civilian view is that the police officers stored the items with the intention of passing it on to criminal elements in society. This is frightening to say the least. Imagine that they taking away guns from one set of criminals and passing it out to a different set of criminals. The second set being their friends so even more invincible than the first set. Frightening to say the least.

The Police perspective is different. There are some who believe that the Police when seizing arms, ammunition and narcotics do not report the full amount seized. This is because many times the person found with the items is not the actual owner but simply a petty transporter. However when searches are carried out on the known “big men in the business” nothing is ever found. The Police officers frustrated by this have to find crafty ways to hold the known perpetrators. So they use the unreported guns, ammunitions and narcotics found in previous raids to pin on “known” criminals to charge them. This would explain why they did not remove the items when they realized that the station was being monitored. While noble, this sort of vigilante justice is scary, because we have all heard the story of somebody son who was held with a small amount of weed, probably for personal use and when he get charge the amount mysteriously increased. So, where does the vigilante just stop? While I admire the fact that the police try their best to work with the system that they have but this leave the window open for abuse of power. Additionally it is hard for a police officer to charge a criminal and then to go before a magistrate to be released shortly thereafter.

The police service gossip behind the items found in the station was that a member of the Criminal Investigation Department which was the unit in the St. Joseph police station that was raided sold out the unit to the Anti Corruption Bureau. So it makes me wonder if that man had not gotten bad feeling about his co-workers this thing would not have been investigated because it seems to be the norm. Who knows if this gossip is true? But it does offer an alternative theory.