And along with those new vehicles, the Commissioner is also anticipating an increase in the number of serving police officers.
Last week, the Cabinet gave its approval for the Ministry of Home Affairs to proceed with the intake of Recruit Squad #96. This is expected to increase the strength of the police department by an additional 150 police officers.
The Commissioner told us that these new officers will replenish the operational strength lost with the dismissal of over 100 police officers:
Chester Williams - Commissioner of Police
"When we did a study, it showed that from recruiting the last recruit squad to the end of March this year, we had dismissed at least a hundred officers. We had our recruit squad of 223. Now looking at the present, we have dismissed close to 150 police officers. So, we're trying to replenish the officers we lost over the past year. By the time the recruit squad passes out, that number will be far greater than 150. And so it is difficult for us to be able to play catch up. In 2016 the strength of the department was 2300, and we are now in 2022. Our strength is 2,037. So you are seeing that we are down compared to 2016, and we're seeing an increase in population, the potential increase for crime to be high, due to unemployment resulting from COVID and different factors that could cause a spike in crime. But despite that, our numbers are down, and so we're happy that Cabinet has approved this squad of 150 officers for us. We're hoping that when we are finished with this squad, we can look perhaps next year to do another one and try to bring our figures up to at least 2,500. Our ideal figure would be 3,000, but we certainly can work with 2500."
