KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent, Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves used his first radio appearance in 2023 to send a message to the police chief and the constabulary’s top brass – more significant police presence is needed on the ground.
“I hope Colin [John] is listening to me — the Commissioner of Police and the others in the leadership at the ranks of police,” Gonsalves, who is also Minister of National Security, said Wednesday on NBC Radio, speaking from Guyana, where he is on an official four-day visit.
“We have enough police and enough resources for persons to be more present on the ground to deter a man who might want to do something bad and to get the intelligence to be able to move proactively to arrest those who are engaged in serious criminal activity and especially with gun crimes.”
Gonsalves spoke after a year in which St. Vincent and the Grenadines saw 42 homicides, up from the 2016 record of 40.
The prime minister said that this year, his government had allocated EC$41 million (One EC dollar = US$0.37) for recurrent expenditure by the police force.
He said the amount does not account for spending on the Coast Guard and fire brigade, which are departments of the police force.
“I’m not talking about capital expenditure,” Gonsalves said, adding that the amount that technocrats had allocated for repairs of police stations in the EC$1.4 billion Estimates of Income and Expenditure for 2023 was “too puny.”
“I told the professionals to go back to the drawing board and review all the stations. And if I have to take an additional set of estimates to the house within the first quarter or whatever to deal more substantively with some of those repairs.”
Parliament is slated to debate the following week’s EC$1.44 billion budget for 2023.
“But you are not going to get me to do things in some pya-pya manner,” he said, using a colloquial term meaning “mediocre.”
“That’s not how we function. We never functioned that way. But we have about 1,200 police; we have more than ten police officers for every 1,000 persons, which is a big number. And we will hire more as we are going to do — 53 more this year. Very shortly, we’re going to have about 115 recruits put into the training system for the next six months and so on,” the Prime Minister said.
and then 