Commissioner Paul Morrison
Mr. Paul Morrison, Commissioner of the Royal Anguilla Police Force, says the men and women under his command are doing a lot of good work on the island as their performance records are showing.
He was at the time commenting on a recent public incident that led to the suspension of at least one officer.
“The thing is: you should never judge the Royal Anguilla Police Force on one isolated incident,” he told The Anguillian newspaper while referring to certain critical statements by some members of the public.
“Of course, we are looking at that incident where an officer may or may not have had an altercation with a member of the public,” he stated. “But that must not define the police. If you look at the fact that there are 41 less people shot over the last three years; that there are 70 percent reductions in robberies; similar reductions in burglaries; and 38 percent reductions in all other crimes, you can see that, in order to achieve that level of performance, officers must have done some good work. We should never be judged on one incident. We should be judged on our overall performance. Of course every now and then our work may not be to everyone’s liking. However, it is based on doing the right thing within the law.”
Mr. Morrison said that the Anguilla police put a huge amount of effort into keeping the people of the island safe. “A lot of that effort people don’t see,” he stressed. “It is not just the visible patrols. There are a lot of things that go on in terms of intelligence, the management of intelligence and the way the tasks are carried out that the public don’t see. But we have processes in place that allow us to direct our limited resources at those who have the highest probability or propensity to cause crime – and these must have some impact on crime reduction.”
The Commissioner, who has just returned from the annual conference of the Association of Caribbean Chiefs of Police Officers, in the Cayman Islands, under the theme “Trans-national Crime,” said that the agenda included cyber crime in its widest sense – something that Anguilla was already looking at. He explained that such crime not only targets businesses in terms of ideas and other matters, but also vulnerable persons in terms of deception, stealing their identities and money; and in terms of cyber and bullying through the internet and social media.
According to him, Anguilla, like any other country, cannot stand alone without working in cooperation with its most local neighbours. He was happy that there was such cooperation among Anguilla, French St. Martin, Dutch St. Maarten and St. Kitts, as well as on a more regional scale with the rest of the region, and international partners in the UK and the United States.
Commenting on the situation in Anguilla, Commissioner Morrison stated: “Perhaps we have not seen the commercial stealing of ideas and patents that other countries may experience, but we certainly get cyber attacks to steal identities. We had a recent spate of crimes at the Automatic Teller Machines. These attacks were cyber-based. The identities have been taken from persons not resident in Anguilla but across the world…St. Maarten recently had the same problem with an uplift of these cyber attacks and there is a real message to the public.
“It is that you must keep your data secure and be very wary when you are in restaurants and bars, that you are perhaps not familiar with, that your card is not being skim-read by a card reader; and that when you enter your pin you keep it covered so that your pin could be entered without people seeing. Especially around ATMs, you must look for anything that does not look normal. This includes a card or something else, such as a box, that is never normally at an ATM. Sometimes there may be cameras or card sleeves that have been put into the ATM device which reads your card and prevents you from using it…There is a real need for people to keep their personal data and not to share it.”
Mr. Morrison disclosed that the persons who recently scammed the ATMs in Anguilla were not resident on the island but in St. Maarten. “They come here for various periods of time, carry out crimes and go back to St. Maarten in order to avoid detection,” he stated. “Our strategic goal is to try and join-up with those four countries, which are local partners, as closely as we can, in the sharing of intelligence and mapping the movement of persons of interest between the four countries. In that way, we can try to reduce the opportunities for crime in any of them – and this is what we are trying to do.”
The Commissioner continued: “We have very good relationships with the French and the Dutch on a number of levels. There is the local level – the inter-cooperation between our own police force, the French and the Dutch police. Then, at an organisational level, as a tripartite group, we look at crime trends and the sharing of intelligence. There is a higher level group – the Attorney General in Anguilla and his counterparts in those two countries; and at the senior level are the Governor of Anguilla, the French Prefect and the Governor’s equivalent in Dutch St. Maarten. This is in order for us to reach the higher agreements we sometimes need. We have [also] reached that level in St. Kitts. At the policing level it is very accommodating – and it is likely that in June, or very early in July, we are going back to St. Kitts where we are trying to build a ballistic-sharing relationship between ourselves, French St. Martin, Dutch St. Maarten and St. Kitts. We are looking at the movement of firearms between these four countries.”
After commenting on such matters as the recruitment of more police officers from Anguilla and the region, fighting crime and improving the capabilities of the island’s police force, Commissioner Morrison gave the following message to the people of Anguilla:
“The members of the Royal Anguilla Police Force are a professional body. As men and women, who every day put themselves in harm’s way to protect the public, they do so using the law, training, policy and the direction they are given. We have a clear code of ethics and a clear code of standards which we are expected to uphold.
“We give the best service we can with the resources we have. We do not distinguish based on race or diversity. We distinguish on the law and our application of the law to certain circumstances. We try very, very hard to meet the expectations of the public every single day. You should be proud of the men and women who work for this Force because they do their best for Anguilla.
“Every now and then there will be mistakes. We can learn from some of these mistakes and we can improve our services based on a review of our mistakes. We do not take things relating to the public lightly. We take them seriously and they will be investigated where appropriate, through the police Special Standards Department.
“I want to say to the public: keep faith with the police. We have never lost faith with the public. We know that we have a special relationship with the public – one that is precious and must be maintained. We have never lost faith in the belief that such a relationship still exists.”
