“It is with immense pride and deep respect that I extend congratulations to every woman police officer of the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service as we mark seventy-one years since women first took up the office of constable in this organisation.
In 1955, 12 women stepped into a Service that had never before known their presence. They did so without precedent, without a road already built, and often without the welcome they deserved. What they possessed instead was courage, conviction and an unshakeable belief that they belonged in the work of protecting this nation.
Seventy-one years later, the answer to that belief is written across every division, branch, unit and section of this Service.
Today, women serve with distinction throughout the TTPS. They are in the Homicide Bureau of Investigations and the Criminal Investigations Department, building cases that bring closure to grieving families. They serve in the Special Investigations Unit and the Special Branch, where intelligence work demands patience, discretion and an unerring eye for detail. They are Crime Scene investigators, Fingerprint Experts and police photographers, whose precision turns evidence into justice. They serve in the Financial Investigations Branch, the Fraud Squad and the Cyber Crime Unit, meeting the sophistication of modern criminality with sharper skill.
They stand on the front line where the danger is greatest, in the Guard and Emergency Branch, the Inter-Agency Task Force, the Anti-Kidnapping Unit and the Firearms Interdiction Unit. They serve as Bomb Technicians, entering the situations from which every instinct urges retreat. They lead in the Child Protection Unit and the Gender-Based Violence Unit, where compassion and professionalism must exist together.
They ride as motorcyclists and patrol our roadways in the Traffic and Highway Patrol Branch. They serve in the Mounted and Canine Branch, and in every police division across Trinidad and Tobago. They shape the next generation at the Police Academy and strengthen the institution itself through Professional Standards, Human Resources, Corporate Communications and Administration. There is scarcely a branch or section of this Service in which a woman has not served, and served well.
In each of these areas, women have performed with excellence alongside their male counterparts. Not in their shadow, and not as an exception to the rule, but as officers of equal competence, equal commitment and equal courage. Women now hold command at every level of this organisation, including the Executive — and a woman has held the highest office in this Service, serving as Commissioner of Police. That is perhaps the clearest measure of how far we have come from 1955: there is no rank in this
organisation that a woman has not earned, and no office she cannot hold. Their leadership has strengthened our operational effectiveness, our integrity and our standing with the public we serve.
The contribution of women to law enforcement in Trinidad and Tobago cannot be measured only in arrests, convictions or operations. It is measured also in the trust they have built in communities that had grown wary of us, in the victims who found the confidence to come forward because a woman officer sat across from them, and in the countless young women who now see policing as a career worthy of their ambition. To those who have gone before, the pioneers who opened a door that had
been closed: this Service is what it is today because of you.
To those who serve now, in every rank and in every corner of these islands, you carry that legacy forward with dignity and pride, and you do so with my full confidence. To those who will come after: know that a place has been made for you here, and that it was made by women who refused to accept anything less. I salute you. I salute those who came before you. I salute those who serve today with honour, with courage and with unwavering commitment to the
people of Trinidad and Tobago.
Congratulations on seventy-one years of service, sacrifice and excellence.”