By: Spokesman Newsroom
BASSETERRE, St. Kitts (Friday 8th March 2019)-Collectively, local authorities of St. Kitts-Nevis along with those of neighbouring islands Anguilla plus St. Maarten (both Dutch and French sides) are teaming up to address interconnected movement of criminal gang activity across the territories by examining a number of proposed initiatives including legislative networking, improved information sharing and equipment purchasing.
Such information was revealed to members of the media following a meeting of top local and regional law enforcement officials and National Security Ministry officials conducted on Monday 25th February at the Customs Department’s Conference Room in Bird Rock.
Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of National Security Osmond Petty talked about the “Criminal elements who are moving between the islands and we want to work out a mechanism to alert each other islands when these persons are on the move so that some kind of action can be taken at the other end as is allowed by the respective legislations in those countries.”
According to him: “Very importantly though we want to move from sharing information on a person to person basis so that rather than just simply calling you from St. Maarten, we want to have a proper connection between agencies so that it is not just personal sharing of information but the government of St. Maarten… the police will contact the police in St. Kitts and Anguilla and so there is collaboration between agencies rather than individuals.”
Petty added: “We wish to look at the possibility of purchasing equipment at more cost effective way and also sharing expertise in dealing with this equipment so we do not have to be act on our own dealing with the technology that is required to trace some of the criminal activity that is taking place so we hope where possible purchase jointly some of the equipment needed to do some of our work.”
The National Security official said they want to look closely at mapping and categorising of gangs.
“There are gangs which are totally local and they operate in the countries but then there are gangs it seems in some of our three islands which may be getting more transnational so that they are not operating locally in St. Kitts for example but they have arms in some of the other islands- St. Maarten, Anguilla and even elsewhere and we would want to look at those,” he explained.
In addition, anti-gang legislation in the countries will be looked at with a view of sharing and improving such.
“Generally, our main commitment is to find the best ways of ensuring that the three islands represented here, St Kitts of course being fully independent…Anguilla and St. Maarten are states within other independent jurisdictions and so we want to find the best way of collaborating between the three islands so that together we can address criminal elements moving between the islands,” advised.
Anguilla’s Police Commissioner Paul Morrison pointed out that in criminality, there is no respect for national boundaries, and underlined the significance of working harder and smarter to arrest the situation.
“Our countries face some very big strategic challenges, criminality that does transcend national boundaries. There is no respect for national boundaries and behind every statistic there is a victim and there is a family, someone is hurt or harmed by the crimes that these people commit whether they use firearms, peddling controlled substances or trafficking human beings, we need to work smarter and harder and in order to work smarter and harder, we have got to work together,” he said.
St.Kitts-Nevis’ Acting Police Commissioner Hilroy Brandy commented that: “If the criminals are working, I think it is best we too as law enforcement have to network and come up with the best solutions to keep our countries and our citizens and our visitors safe.”