MORE than 500 police patrol vehicles worth tens of millions of dollars have ended up as scrap over the past three years. And Police Commissioner Gary Griffith has a plan to keep the new fleet roadworthy by targeting road hogs—in police uniform.

Griffith acted last Friday after CCTV footage captured two newly-purchased Toyota RAV-4 patrol vehicles crashing into a truck in Charlieville that day. It turned out that the police officers driving those vehicles were not responding to any distress call.

The officers, assigned to the newly-launched Emergency Response Patrol, had just installed a GPS tracking system in the patrol vehicles. And it was that very tracking system that allowed their seniors to know that before the crash, the officers were driving at 140 kilometres per hour on the Uriah Butler Highway, where the speed limit is 100kph, and at 89 kph on the secondary road (the speed limit is 40kph) when they wrecked the State vehicles.

The officers have been suspended from driving police vehicles until the case is investigated by an internal disciplinary committee. The two patrol vehicles, worth more than $500,000, were extensively damaged and have joined the hundreds of other cars, SUVs, pick-up trucks and police buses being kept at compounds in north and south Trinidad.(Trinidad Express)…[+]