By Alicia Chamely

” MESSY and unacceptable” is how former Commissioner of Police Gary Griffith describes the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service’s (TTPS) announcement that it had recommended the declaration of a State of Emergency (SOE).

On Friday morning the TTPS put out a media release saying they had recommended to the government to declare a SOE, stating, “intelligence reveals that incarcerated individuals are actively leveraging internal and external networks to plan and execute attacks on key figures within the national security and justice sectors.”

This release was put out into the public space approximately two hours before the government had announced that an order for a SOE had been formally declared by President Christine Kangaloo.

In a sharply worded video on Friday, Griffith called the TTPS’s statement of recommendation as, “Stupidity at the highest level.”

Griffith said, “Why would you as the police service, the hierarchy, state to the public we do not have the capability to secure you, so we want the government to call a state of emergency without the government yet making that decision.”

He continued, “It is unbelievable that this release was sent out, because it shows the inability of the police service to understand how it to operate as it pertains to sensitive documents.”

Griffith said all discussions and recommendations for the calling a SOE must be done with confidentiality until the government has made an official announcement.

The former commissioner said, “You put a letter to the public letting them know you intend to have covert and overt operations. How foolish is that. “

Griffith said, “This whole thing, it is very messy, it was unacceptable, it should not have been, and it shows some lack of degree of understanding the confidentiality of correspondence.”

He finished, “This should never have been sent to the public until the government had made the official decision to call the State of Emergency or not.”