This newspaper has been preaching over the past three months that the only way we, as a country, can combat crime is to work with the RCIPS as a united team. This unification has to be  on equal terms but the biggest and hardest problem is trust.

The majority of the general public do not trust the police. The RCIPS seem not to trust the public. The public is secretive and the police seem to be worse. More powers are being given to the police every week and the public only learn about it after it is written into law and more of our liberties are eroded. Liberties that people fought wars over to achieve. These liberties are taken away at a stroke of a pen by a select few – some whom the people never even placed in power.

The bloggers have a field day on some of the media sites. They delightfully and maliciously castigate the RCIPS at every turn. They believe nothing the police say and any initiative they instigate is met with derision. In turn the police prosecute people with the full intent of the law in the most trivial of offences that cost the country thousands and makes the general public shake their heads in disbelief.

We have a situation now, when despite repeated requests from the RCIPS for individuals who had phone or messaging contact with missing person Kerran Baker to come forward. They have not.  Now, the police have announced they are going to “be a bit more intelligently aggressive.” A simple question to RCIPS Supt. Marlon Bodden asking whether officers had known who was messaging Ms. Baker met with the reply, “Read through the lines.”

I can understand the police appealing for people to come forward if they have been in contact with Ms. Baker by BBM or other means, but I cannot understand why only now they are going to interview these people if they know who they are. This is a high profile missing person investigation! Why leave it until now?

We have had no update from the RCIPS re missing guns, the investigations into the armed robberies with the shootings of innocent people, nor the ones without. We have seen, by the thankfully bungling of some of these crimes, that the intelligence of the criminals is at the level of a ten year old (and here I am insulting that age group) yet they are able to get away and still remain at large despite all the resources the RCIPS have. All we get from the RCIPS is silence or appeals for help. The latest robbery at KFC last Thursday (18) is a case in point. My dog is more intelligent than these robbers and she doesn’t need to brandish weapons to make you scared of her. Her name is Sugar and she is not always sweet to people she thinks are trespassers.

We have a phone tapping law that was put in place secretively and despite some very strong reservations iNews has looked at it positively. Despite the costly mess a former governor left us in, the sole person who can order the phone tapping is the Governor.

All the media has taken up the gauntlet for tougher penalties for drunken driving and we are on the same side. I have not received any feedback from my questioning why we have to have a limited time for gun amnesty? No matter when law-abiding people hand a gun in voluntarily it should be with no risk of prosecution. Instead harsher penalties are instigated prohibiting anyone doing this. The RCIPS are amazed at the poor response to the amnesty especially at their meetings that were designed to deal with a whole host of other concerns outside the handing in of guns. When you have an advertising campaign blazing the words “Gun Amnesty Meeting”, at a time when a large number of people are away on vacation and criminals are brandishing guns and doing indiscriminate shooting, why are they amazed?

The old days, when I was a young lad and the policeman (or Bobby as we called him) patrolled the streets on his bicycle, he knew who the “wronguns” were. He was respected as we knew his name. Those days have gone. Yes, we do have community officers, and I welcomed the initiative, but that seems to have disappeared. The police now patrol in pairs, housed in air-conditioned new fast cars and don’t even stop for a friendly wave or a word. They flash by our house whilst my wife is gardening thankful that she is not brandishing a gun, although I am fearful she may be arrested for using a machete. How many of them know she is the daughter of deceased Chief of Police Major, “Roddy” Watler. The ‘Dog City’ Watler Road is named after him. I wonder what he is thinking of all this?