NOT all police officers exercise brutality, hostility, or are corrupt, a label placed on many by citizens. This is according to Pastor Vickram Hajaree, Senior Pastor of the Point Fortin Open Bible Cathedral, who spoke on Sunday at a function to celebrate the church’s golden jubilee anniversary.
To commemorate the event, the church honoured over 100 police officers with a plaque at a special service held at the church’s building located at Cap-de-Ville Main Road. Among those honoured were retired police sergeant Haynes Fraser and former police commissioner James Philbert and his wife Pamela Philbert. Hajaree said, “We (in Point Fortin) have been spared a lot of the ills in terms of crime, murders and banditry that are taking place in different parts of the country because of good policing. We have to let them (police officers) know that they are appreciated. We have crime but it is not on a wide scale. Point Fortin is relatively safe and it has been for the past few years.”
He said persons should not speak negatively about police officers. “Sometimes when you say bad things about people, you get bad things coming out of them. We have to speak good about people. So we hoped that the service served as a motivation to the officers so that they would continue the good work.”
This Sunday, several youths will be honoured in a church ceremony. “Some of the young achievers, they are just graduating from school and we wanted to let them know that in itself is an achievement,” Hajaree said. And in September, the doctors and nurses who serve in the community will receive awards. Hajaree said, “The nurses and the doctors, they have been working under adverse conditions at the Point Fortin Hospital. Some say they feel as if the hospital is actual a health centre because there are health centres with better facilities than the hospital. So we wanted to honour them also. ” He added, “The church should be a giving agency. We do a lot of community work and we felt that to celebrate our fiftieth anniversary we should have shown appreciation for those in our community.”
Source: Daily Express. “Open Bible honours Point Fortin cops.” Daily Express, Jul 23, 2012.
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