Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar on Friday dismissed the argument by Opposition Leader Keith Rowley that the problem with the process for selecting a police commissioner is that it will always put a foreigner at the top of list. She pointed out that the opposite happened when the Police Service Commission (PSC) followed the process.
"The very first time we followed this process, it gave us, at the top of the list, a national of Trinidad and Tobago; he was rejected, Stephen Williams."
The Manning government rejected Williams in 2008, stating that he lacked the experience for the job and that the selection process was flawed. Rowley was one of the government MPs who voted to reject Williams.
Persad-Bissessar said in the case of Canadian Neal Parker he was was not accepted as the Commissioner of Police (CoP) because of a parliamentary oversight. She said he would have been the CoP if he had not been a part of the Penn State evaluation team in 2008.
But the director of the Justice and Safety Institute (JASI) of the Pennsylvania State University has defended Parker, saying the institute invited him to apply for the job.
Don Zettlemoyer told the Trinidad Express there was no conflict of interest regarding his application and it is absurd for people to think Parker could have had inside information regarding the 2010 assessment process.
Zettlemoyer said both processes were totally different, adding that it is unfortunate that Parker’s integrity was questioned when he did absolutely nothing wrong when he applied for the job.
"It is not unusual that somebody who is an assessor today may be a candidate tomorrow," he said.
"The processes are not the same, it changes each time. The assertion that somebody who was an assessor in 2008 and now, walked through as a candidate, may have had an advantage on the others is not true at all and is not the case. There is no merit to that assertion at all," Zettlemoyer told the Express.
"It was part of our contractual agreement...to go out there and find people we believe are qualified for the job, and we did just that. We invited Parker and another person who did the evaluation... There are different specific systems used each time," Zettlemoyer said.
He added, "If they want a local police commissioner, the law should have simply said so," adding that there is nothing to prevent the parliament from going through the list and eventually picking a local for the job.
He also said his establishment would not take on any responsibility of starting the process all over again since the integrity of its assessors would have come into question/
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