Mr. Baines

Photo: File

The two government agencies most responsible for keeping Cayman’s residents and borders safe admitted last week that they are facing serious challenges with staffing.

Royal Cayman Islands Police Service Commissioner David Baines said his organisation was starting to make up a gap that at one time had reached some 85 police officers, but he said RCIPS still needed many more skilled police professionals in the areas of criminal investigations and neighbourhood policing.

Meanwhile, Portfolio of the Civil Service Chief Officer Franz Manderson – who has oversight responsibility for law enforcement, including immigration - said the country’s Immigration Department is having a tough time hiring Caymanian officers to fill vacant posts there – particularly in the enforcement section.  

Although, the Immigration Department has hired – and even been led by - non-Caymanians in the past, the general policy is to hire local people first, Mr. Manderson said.

“We’re certainly not at the stage yet where we want to have non-nationals in the Immigration Department enforcing our laws – we don’t want to go down that road at the moment,” he told a group of about 50 people who attended a Chamber of Commerce event last Wednesday at the Marriott.

Meanwhile, Mr. Baines said RCIPS was looking to foreign shores to bring in the kind of investigative expertise that the police service has been lacking in.

“The RCIPS has seen…the haemorrhaging of skilled people leaving the force,” he said, adding that an aggressive recruitment campaign was under way in both Europe and North America for civilian crime scene techs and experienced detectives.

The commissioner also noted that the police service is recruiting locally for neighbourhood officers, whose numbers had been reduced to about 12. Mr. Baines said he’d like to see that get up to 29 or 30 officers eventually.

Local contractor Steve Hawley urged Mr. Baines to redevelop neighbourhood policing efforts, but warned that re-establishing officers’ connections with the community might take some time.

“It’s been a quarter of a century since I’ve seen an officer talking to someone in the street,” Mr. Hawley said. “Today, if two officers get out of a car and walk toward your house…you want to go inside and close your door.”

The commissioner said the community relations problem might be resolved quicker if more officers were added to the force.

“We have enough officers responding (to calls),” Mr. Baines said. “But our neighbourhood policing as it existed three or four years ago has collapsed.”

Mr. Baines said he was being forced at the moment to “rob” officers from specialist functions like neighbourhood policing to ensure there were enough cops on the streets. He also said some training was needed for neighbourhood police officers to be effective.

“It’s not about just patting dogs and saying hello to kids,” the commissioner said.

Of the 85 job vacancies that existed, Mr. Baines estimated some 46 positions remain to be filled.

Mr. Manderson said the Cayman Islands Immigration Department has received budget approval to hire another 10 to 12 officers, but that recruiting efforts were being hampered by low salaries.

“Regretfully, immigration officers are not as well paid as I think they should (be),” Mr. Manderson said. “We had one immigration officer who left the department and went to planning to work as a compliance officer and got a substantial raise.”

How to bring individuals of “the right sort” to the Immigration Department was the subject of a recent staff meeting, he said.

“The (immigration) enforcement section is not as robust as it should be,” Mr. Manderson said. “But we will get there shortly as soon as we can hire the new staff.”

Chamber President Stuart Bostock even questioned whether the Immigration Department was putting enough emphasis on enforcement as one of its primary duties.

“There’s nothing (on the immigration website) about protecting the country from immigrants who come here with the intention of breaking our laws,” Mr. Bostock said. “We need to look at who comes into our country, not just where they come from.”

The Chamber organisation has expressed concern in the past that the Immigration Department was spending too much of its time and resources policing employment matters such as work permit issuance and the like.

Mr. Manderson said the absence of border protection from the department’s website mission statement was an oversight and confirmed that immigration officials do indeed consider that a top priority.