POLICE SAY 35 PERSONS ‘CAUSING THE MOST HARM’ TO TCI

There are 35 persons who are involved in most of the criminal activity that “caused the most harm” to Turks and Caicos Islands, according to the Royal Turks and Caicos Islands Police Force.

Superintendent of Police Mat Newton, a veteran detective from the United Kingdom (UK) who is now attached to the local police force, said laemen have identified those persons and will be going after them.

“In the last four months using organised crime route mapping and working closely with all the elements of the force we’ve been robust in terms of identifying people. We currently have 35 people that we’ve identified who caused the most harm to our islands and all of those people now have been arrested 19 people and many of those have been charged and some of those have been remanded as well. We’ve done over 25 separate armed operations trying to take those people out of circulation, to look at evidence and bring them to justice,” he said during a press conference on Friday December 22nd, 2023.

In addition, Acting Commissioner of Police Rodney Adams assured that general public that they will be takin a zer-tolerane, non-nonsense approach to gang activity and crime.

“The Royal Turks and Caicos Islands Police Force remain open to all options that are available to us and certainly will continue to pursue those. One of the things that we want to reemphasize is the fact that those persons that have been identified to us as gang members we will be relentless in pursuing them and bring them to justice,” Adams said.

The senior police officers said the Royal Turks and Caicos Islands Police Force has taken a new approach with the purpose of identifying gangs in the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Superintendent of Police Dean Holden, who is also from the UK, said new organised crime route mapping will allow the Forced to map out all organized crime groups.

“We have an approach now where we have organised crime route mapping, so we’re trying to map out all our organized crime groups with a serious organised crime group management strategy, which is a tiered approach. We set those groups in terms of high, medium and standard and then we apply resources and disruption and targeting commensurate with our risk,” he said.

He added: “It will be remiss of me to go through the details of those in terms of numbers and such, but what I can say is it is a proportion that we would expect for this island but in addition to that, the problems that we suffer here are not unique especially not in the Caribbean and when you look at some of the other islands they’ve probably got greater threats in relation to organised criminality. It is something that is in its infancy and it is something that we’re developing.”

Holden said the Force is also trying to develop some of their specialist capabilities to target them better.

“What I can say yes, we are blighted by organised crime groups. A high proportion of our serious violent crimes are committed by gangs on gangs, but we have a strategy now in place to target that and going forward we have confidence that we will probably have more inroads and more effect in terms of curbing their criminality,” he said.

Holden declined to say how many gangs are in Turks and Caicos Islands.

“It would be inappropriate to give names of gangs or the numbers, but what I can say is that the organised crime route mapping is something that has been adopted from process in the UK. So in terms of expertise influence that has actually been initiated by UK analyst and has been carried on by our national crime intelligence bureau. In terms of further expertise, I think it is fair to say there’s already existing talent and expertise on island however, myself and certainly Mr. Newton came from the UK, are looking to engender and enhance sort of that capability.”

“I would never describe myself as an expert, but I’ve certainly worked in the organised crime gang sort of area and arena for some years and what we’re trying to do is bring some of our practices here but also look at what is successful in the region. We have a lot of humility around our approach. We’re not saying that we’ve got all of the answers we continue to strive for the answers but we continue to strive and develop our capabilities,” he added.

Asked why it would be inappropriate to give the number of gangs, Holden said, “In terms of the number of gangs…that’s the only information we have so there’s a concern around some level of misinformation. What we don’t want to do is either give certain gang members alerts that we’re aware of them or otherwise provide members of the community with all the concerns but what I can say is, it is a number of gangs and there’s probably commensurate with a population of this island from my personal view and having dealt with this sort of area of criminality for the best part of 20 years, it is not disproportionate so that is one of the reassurance that I want to give. However, we continue to develop our intelligence picture around them.”

Holden said the Royal Turks and Caicos Islands Police Force continues to try and develop their intelligence picture around that.

He added: “Where we were six months ago, we’re far further on. There’s always work to do and of course our intelligence picture is only as good as the intelligence we have… but we really do need people to support us. Probably 80% of our intelligence around gangs comes from communities, so while we may have our police tactics and other operations where we can gather information intelligence, we do rely on our communities. My view is that we have more to do, but however we are making inroads and progress in terms of having that coordinated approach.”

Newton added that the Force has taken 16 firearms out of circulation in the last four months, three of those being automatic firearms.

He added: “I just want to echo the sentiments of the Acting Commissioner to say that we do this with the public, we know that the public have information and we know sometime that they’re fearful but I will say one thing to you, you give us the information and we’ll give you the results.”