With significant improvements to the Royal Anguilla Police Force to his credit, during his first three-year period as Commissioner, Mr. Paul Morrison has laid out new plans to further strengthen the role and effectiveness of the island’s law enforcement agency. This has come with the extension of his contract.
He has a just-announced additional two-year contract to accomplish what appears to be a most ambitious and versatile set of lofty goals. He first outlined most of them at the Governor’s press conference on Monday, January 14, and two days later at his own press conference at Police Headquarters on Wednesday, January 16. There, he was accompanied by a number of senior officers who are the team members involved in the new initiatives, as well as representatives of the Governor’s Office.
“Over the last three to four years, the complete focus of the Force has been on the reduction of serious crime,” Commissioner Morrison told media representatives. “In order to do that, it is not possible just to say that’s a priority without actually putting some effort into making sure that we can achieve that. But if you look at performance figures, over the last three years, you will see that serious crime is down significantly in a number of tell-tale areas such as robberies and shootings – although murders seem to be consistently the same over that period when firearms were used.” He said there were also strides in dealing with other horrific crimes as well as in tackling cases of domestic violence.
Mr. Morrison said there was now a need to restructure the Police Force to put officers in the right jobs and places so that matters of crime could be tackled in an effective way. “The old model didn’t work in terms that there were insufficient resources attributed to tackle these issues, and we didn’t have a lot of people in frontline policing,” he stated. We also needed to develop our skills, so over the three years we talked about the staff development programmes… to give officers the best opportunities when they get into complex situations so that they can make the right decisions.”
Among the new initiatives is for the police to work with other organisations to look at young people who would be more susceptible to become radicalized, and who need greater attention to be diverted away from crime and into a more meaningful existence. The Commissioner disclosed that Mr. Chrispen Gumbs was the new Community Policing Inspector. “His role will be to draw together all the strands that exist into a more cohesive single strategy rather than a series of separate initiatives,” he explained. “This will include working with the churches and myself.
“We met the other day with pastors who are very keen in becoming involved in stopping young people from drifting into crime. We are also working with the schools to reduce the levels of violence displayed by students to one another, and we have seen some of the shooting incidents where sides have been taken and gang fighting representing whatever faction has been involved in shootings on the street. We need someone to work with all these different people to bring them into one single crime reduction plan.”
Commissioner Morrison also spoke on a number of other crime reduction initiatives. These include the establishment of a Professional Standards Department to handle cases of internal corruption and breaches of confidentiality in the Police Force. Another plan is to improve the firearm weaponry of police officers including the use of taser equipment later on.
The Commissioner’s disclosures were very detailed, and comprehensive, and will be the subject of another report in the next edition of The Anguillan newspaper.
