Jensen La Vende

Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Er­la Hare­wood-Christo­pher says she is hap­py with what the po­lice re­ceived in the bud­get and will use what she re­ceived to the best of her abil­i­ty.

Hare­wood-Christo­pher spoke with the me­dia at the Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port at the end of the com­mem­o­ra­tion of the Cubana Air­lines flight 455 where 73 peo­ple, most­ly Cubans were killed when a bomb ex­plod­ed on their plane. The flight was head­ing from Bar­ba­dos to Ja­maica on Oc­to­ber 6, 1976.

Asked about the $2.6 bil­lion al­lo­ca­tion, Hare­wood-Christo­pher said she is grate­ful de­spite not get­ting all they want­ed.

“We are grate­ful for what­ev­er we have, and we will be mak­ing full use of what we got. The good thing about it is that we can al­ways go back to the min­is­ter in the mid-year re­view, so we look for­ward to that,” she said. Last Mon­day Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert pre­sent­ed his tenth fis­cal pack­age in which the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty re­ceived $6.113 bil­lion. In­clud­ed in the $2.6 bil­lion for po­lice is $67.5 mil­lion for pub­lic or­der and safe­ty, $225,000 to es­tab­lish the Spe­cial Op­er­a­tions Counter Home/Busi­ness In­va­sions Task Force, $3 mil­lion for Seis­mic Fu­sion Cen­tre, set­ting up of a Po­lice Com­mu­ni­ty and Out­reach Pro­gramme unit, train­ing and de­vel­op­ment for of­fi­cers for $6 mil­lion, and a $5 mil­lion state-of-the-art po­lice acad­e­my at Cu­mu­to.

In ad­dress­ing the is­sue of crime, Im­bert said, “To en­hance po­lice pres­ence, the po­lice ser­vice seeks to ad­vance its fleet by 2,000 ve­hi­cles over the next three years, with 500 new ve­hi­cles in the first phase.

Asked whether the old po­lice ve­hi­cles could be re­paired rather than pur­chas­ing new ones, Hare­wood-Christo­pher said no, as not all ve­hi­cles could be.

“All the ve­hi­cles that can be fixed, will be fixed. Some of them are be­yond re­pair. And with­in the Gov­ern­ment sys­tem you can’t can­ni­bal­ized ve­hi­cles, so that is a chal­lenge we have,” she ex­plained.

And while a spe­cialised unit will tack­le home in­va­sions, Hare­wood-Christo­pher said there is al­ready a unit to tar­get ex­tor­tion. She said the unit is be­ing head­ed by ACP Richard Smith, who at a me­dia con­fer­ence last month said there are ex­tor­tion­ists as young as eight years old.

Hare­wood-Christo­pher said Smith will hand-pick his mem­bers to en­sure the best qual­i­ty of of­fi­cers join the team.

“He will hand pick who he wants in the unit be­cause we will want to en­sure that the per­sons we se­lect are ca­pa­ble and that they have the ca­pac­i­ty, in­tegri­ty and every­thing else,” she said.

In a me­dia re­lease last week, the top cop lament­ed the sup­posed in­volve­ment of po­lice of­fi­cers in crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ties.

See more bud­get sto­ries on pages 10 and 11