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Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Bar­ry Padarath says he shares some of the con­cerns raised by Min­is­ter of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Roger Alexan­der re­gard­ing the pub­lic dis­sem­i­na­tion of sen­si­tive ma­te­r­i­al on so­cial me­dia, par­tic­u­lar­ly in light of the re­cent po­lice-in­volved killing of Joshua Sama­roo and the in­jury of his wife, Ka­ia Sealy, in St Au­gus­tine.

Alexan­der’s com­ments fol­lowed wide­spread pub­lic out­rage af­ter CCTV footage of the in­ci­dent cir­cu­lat­ed wide­ly on so­cial me­dia. The video, which ap­peared to show Sama­roo with his hands raised in the air out­side his crashed car as po­lice of­fi­cers fired at him, prompt­ed in­tense pub­lic de­bate and re­newed scruti­ny of po­lice con­duct.

Ad­dress­ing re­porters on Wednes­day, Alexan­der em­pha­sised the im­por­tance of the rule of law, cau­tion­ing against how such ma­te­r­i­al is shared pub­licly. He al­so ac­knowl­edged that ev­i­dence was crit­i­cal to pub­lic un­der­stand­ing and con­ced­ed that the po­lice could have re­leased rel­e­vant in­for­ma­tion soon­er. How­ev­er, he al­so said, “Look­ing at it from this an­gle, some­thing needs to be done with those who do that, in terms of the law. You can­not put things out there, get pub­lic opin­ion on on­ly what they saw for two min­utes or a minute and a half, and then draw a con­clu­sion. The time has come for that to change, and there must be law to ad­dress it. That might be the next an­gle we’re look­ing at.”