On Thursday, Justice Kevin Ramcharan struck out two standing orders of the police service that limit how long officers are required to keep their pocket diaries and station diaries.
Triggering the move was a case under judicial review over an incident in 2014, for which a FOIA request for station-diary extracts and pocket diaries was filed in 2020.
In June, it became clear that the relevant documents had been destroyed, in keeping with police standing orders.
In response, ACP William Nurse, head of the police service standing order committee since 2018, noted that the contentious orders were under review and scheduled for redraft.
Also responding was Supt Glen Charles of the Port of Spain city police, who pointed out the more troubling matter of a shortage of space at the police Abattoir Road storage container.
As with the proverbial nail, for want of additional shelving, justice was denied the opportunity of a full hearing.
Justice Ramcharan’s ruling pointed to a significant discrepancy between this regulation governing police officers and the reality of the delivery of justice in TT.
Under standing order 16, police officers may destroy their pocket diaries two years after a case is determined. Standing order 17 allows the destruction of a station diary three years after the determination of a case in which it was used.
But under civil law, it is possible to file a claim within four years of an incident. How, though, can any such matter be continued or further documented evidence unearthed if the official record has been destroyed?
As it turns out, the 2014 confrontation between Keron Phillips and police in Woodbrook, which ended with his being charged, brought overdue light to this conflict between the architecture of justice and its delivery.
The original case against Mr Phillips was dismissed, and it was in seeking to bring a case of malicious prosecution that this messy situation came to the attention of the Judiciary.
Beyond Justice Ramcharan’s ruling, this case should drive the reconsideration of a system in which critical information gathered by the police is shoved into a metal container to await destruction when it could be preserved, organised and filed more efficiently using digital technology.
In 2018, then acting Snr Supt McDonald Jacob promised the people of Rio Claro that the service had a records management database. Nothing has been heard since about that project.
Longhand entries in station diaries should be replaced by live text entry at police stations connected to a central, secure database, while scanner-ready pocket diaries should be standard issue for officers, who would pass them to technicians to be digitised after they are filled.
It would mark a sensible start to the long-overdue digitalisation of the police service, a project that the force has successfully avoided for far too long.
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