Evictions only on court orders

By Alphonse Porau
Police will carry out evictions upon court orders but those involving National Housing Corporation  (NHC) properties will be critically looked at, police say.
National Capital District Metropolitan Superintendent Benjamin Turi told The National that police would be cautious when dealing with National Housing Corporation properties. Turi said sometimes police performed their job without looking at the corruption involved in the giveaway schemes of the NHC.
“We have this housing commission officers leasing to their wantoks, and they give some amount of money before they are given the title.
“This corruption from National Housing Corporation is passed on the police and the end result is we do the eviction,” Turi said.
He said they would check titles of properties to make sure that there was no corruption or fraud involved before could carry out any court-ordered eviction.
Turi said the problem with housing was that some of the tenants were very old and passed on responsibility of paying off houses to their sons or daughters.
There were already complaints about ownership of these properties from people like the one in the news recently at Hohola.
He said such situation had to be looked at before proper documents were filed for police station commanders to carry out the evictions.
“There has to be orders from the court with the commander’s signature and mine before orders are carried out,” he said.
“Police must not use my name or the commander’s without any papers.
“Police are using our names to get authority.
“Any one that comes across this must let me know so that I can deal with them (police officers).”