“Just like the Black Lives Matter for every citizen in this country, and All Lives Matter for the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service, my 10,000 police officers- those black lives matter to me as well.”

The words of Police Commissioner Gary Griffith, as he sought to disarm conversation in the local sphere, which compares the treatment of black people by the TTPS, to the ongoing issue of police brutality in the US.

Griffith believes of equal outrage, should be the hundreds of lives that are lost to crime in this country each year.

His comment comes after voices such as former Emancipation Support Committee Chairman Khafra Kambon and NNV political leader Fuad Abu Bakr spoke out about police shootings in T&T, comparing it to the #BlackLivesMatter movement born out of the US.

Describing policing as “the most difficult but most noble of jobs”, Griffith strongly opposed those who he, as he described it, were attempting to “discredit” his officers.

“The same bitterness and the anger that many of us have by the rightful concern as it pertains to ‘Black Lives Matter’- it should indeed be done here, but let us target it at the right persons, not the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service, we are not the enemy,” he said.

The case of George Floyd, a black man who died in police custody in Minneapolis last Monday, has sparked global outrage over the last week and a half, upping the ante on discussions about race and law enforcement tendencies to racially profile people of African descent.