Participants from the Police, Customs and Immigration Departments in Anguilla began attending a Caribbean Border Enforcement four-day course at Police Headquarters on Tuesday this week.
It is the third such training course conducted locally by the Principal Immigration Officer, Ms Frances Barry, and Detective Ralph Johnson of the Royal Anguilla Police Force, assisted by other officers as part of the supporting team. The course content includes case scenarios involving the use of fraudulent passports by persons to enter Anguilla, fraudulent customs documents, and illegal drugs and firearms entering the island.
Ms Barry, who chaired the opening ceremony, said she and Detective Johnson attended a Caribbean Border Enforcement Trainers Course in October 2007 which was hosted by the Canadian Mounted Police and in which seven Caribbean islands participated. “We, the trainers, have tailored, prepared and proposed the local training for Anguilla’s law enforcement agencies – namely the Customs, the Police and the Immigration Departments. The objective of the course is to provide an intelligence-led approach to resolving and preventing crime through the sharing of information between agencies,” she stated.
Governor Christina Scott, who has responsibility for security, said that although Anguilla was a small island, with a relatively small population and given its geographical location – it was facing a complex and evolving threat. “It is one that is getting more and more difficult for enforcing agencies to respond to, and requires high levels of expertise, skills and professionalism,” she observed.
“Just from the things I have seen, since I have been here six months ago, despite our size Anguilla has sort of got sucked into some rather big-scale issues whether that has to do with drugs, financial crime, or gun violence. These issues are extremely live and extremely significant for the community, so the training you will be doing over the next few days will really help Anguilla tackle those issues and transcend the tide of rising crime that we see in the Caribbean. Anguilla is not yet in that space and we really need to work hard together to prevent it from moving in that direction. ”
Governor Scott said there were murders and persons were being severely injured as a result of gun crime on the island. She advised the course participants that they were on the frontline, and the community was expecting them to work together to tackle that sort of crime – and to prevent guns from entering Anguilla – and to keep them safe.
