Making policing attractive key
There is a manpower crisis in the Royal Barbados Police Force (RBPF) and Attorney General, Dale Marshall believes that it is time to find ways to make policing more attractive to young people.
Marshall’s comments came as he delivered remarks during the opening ceremony of the new Hastings/Worthing Police Station that took place yesterday.
He revealed that the RBPF needed to have a compliment of 1 528 officers, however, they were currently 261 officers short.
“The point is that we have to accept that we have manpower challenges in the Force and it is more than just the natural ebb and flow of people coming in and people retiring. For some reason policing seems to not have the charm and appeal that it did years ago,” he said.
“I compliment members of the Force for their recent efforts, the Prime Minister and I charged them with developing a new programme to make policing appealing to young men and women and I believe that that is beginning to bear some fruit.”
“Our last class of individuals who graduated from the training school, I think the number of people were 18, the current class has about 30 and even though we continue to recruit, people continue to retire on a regular basis.”
It is against this backdrop that the Attorney General believed it was paramount that they found ways to confront this challenge.
However, despite this lack of manpower, Marshall believed that the country owed tremendous debt to the members of the RBPF.
“It is not a new debt, it is one we have always owed, but it is of tremendous comfort and value to us when we recognise that the instability that we endured in 2018 and 2019 was met with firm responses from the
Force itself and an extraordinarily high degree of crime solving,” he said.
He was proud to report that most of the gun-related homicides from last year have been solved; most of the homicides from last year have been solved; and of the four gun related homicides so far for the year, arrests have been made in three cases and substantial progress has been made in the fourth case.
“Given the manpower challenges that the Force had, and stations that weren’t modern I think that we should give them a round of applause for the work that they have done,” he said.