At the police passing-out ceremony in St James on Wednesday, National Security Minister Fitzgerald Hinds seemed happy with the sharp turnout of the 156 new officers who graduated from the Police Academy, newbies with broad smiles and big hopes for their careers in law enforcement.

There is some value in a selection process that winnowed just 156 viable officers out of the thousands who applied to be considered when recruitment opened to the public in January.

But, the successful recruits fall short of the Government's plan to increase the annual intake of successful graduates of officer training from 300 a year to 1,000 annually.

That ambitious goal was set to make a dent in the shortfall of as many as 8,000 officers required to bring the police force back to strength.

Even after such stringent selection, the Commissioner of Police was moved to remind the new officers that, "This profession does not want weakness; it wants strength, honour, intellect, courage and integrity."

In trying to increase raw numbers in the ranks, the National Security Council should not make the mistake of shaping its intake process around standards that date back decades and well past the turn of the century.

Basic training for every individual who joins the police force is necessary to set a baseline for policing capacity, but were there enough individuals in last week's cohort with the background, training and aptitude to properly engage all the aspects demanded of policing in 2024?

TT is well past the stage when officers on bicycles were a community crime deterrent, but is sufficient emphasis being placed on the kind of talent that it will take to respond to increasingly savvy criminals exploiting modern technology to their advantage?

At least one new recruit at May's passing-out event had already taken a BSc in criminology, a promising indicator that this new generation of incoming officers aren’t just offering the baseline requirement of five CSEC passes.

Mr Hinds was also quite proud of to announce the deployment 50 more police vehicles in February “a sampling of 100 purchased by the State” and the activation of 2,500 surveillance cameras across TT, which bring the total number of cameras deployed by the police to 6,749.

But Mr Hinds must be clear that the acquisition of resources is only the start of responding to crimes in TT.

Acquiring more equipment and deploying more officers hasn't made an appreciable difference in the crime rate over the last five years.

While it's clear that there needs to be more officers on the beat, there also needs to be more emphasis on building talent and fresh thinking in the backrooms of the service to develop more effective strategies and tactics to effectively deploy the human and equipment resources already available to the police service.

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