Commissioner of Police Attends Regional Police Conference

Commissioner of Police, Chester Williams, recently attended the ACCP Intercessional Conference in Miami, Florida where he engaged in discussions focused on tackling violent crimes in the Caribbean. Other topics of discussion included the growing issue of cybercrime, transnational organized crime, and the significant increase in the number of firearms around the region.  ComPol Williams highlighted that one of his areas of concern was the poor way the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) accounts for firearms that leave the country.

Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police: “The conference basically was centered around the whole issue of dealing with violent crime within the Caribbean. We also touched on the issue of cyber crime and transnational organized crime as well as the proliferation of firearms within the Caribbean region. We had presentations from ATF and one of my pressing issue to the persons from ATF was the fact that there is poor accountability on their part in terms of the firearms leaving the US and the easy accessibility of firearms by persons in the US that they can just go and buy a firearm and there’s no accountability in terms of what becomes of that firearm and most times those firearms are what end up on our streets and people are killed by those firearms. So we had asked that there is greater accountability from ATF working in conjunction with the ACCP to see how we can develop some portal or some system that we’ll be able to track these firearms more easily when they leave the US. And also for us domestically to ensure that we put more stringent measures in place to be able to search containers and vehicles coming into the country because for the most part that is how the firearms are being smuggled from the US. Well we know the ones from the Guatemala or Central America comes through the porous borders but from the US they’re coming through our lawful borders and again due to the fact that we are not conducting proper searches on containers and vehicles that have been brought into the country.”