Women flocking to become police officers, says AG

A large number of women are applying to join the Barbados Police Service and steps are being taken to accommodate them at the Regional Police Training Centre (RPTC). This was disclosed by Attorney General Dale Marshall yesterday during a signing agreement for the United States government to make a contribution of US$550 000 for the […]

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A large number of women are applying to join the Barbados Police Service and steps are being taken to accommodate them at the Regional Police Training Centre (RPTC).

This was disclosed by Attorney General Dale Marshall yesterday during a signing agreement for the United States government to make a contribution of US$550 000 for the purpose of doing remedial work and renovations at the Seawell, Christ Church facility.

He said Government will also be investing $6 million to build two new dormitories as well as undertaking remedial work on the building to make it more modernised.

While recruitment has been a significant challenge in recent years, Marshall said it started to pick up with more than 60 recruits at the last graduating cohort compared to a low of only 18 a few years ago.

“We’ve done a lot of advertising and marketing and so on to try to get people into policing and I think those efforts have begun to bear fruit. I would like to say, though, that our recent experience shows that more women, or let me be more accurate, a larger number of women than previously, are applying to join the police service,” he said.

“We’ve had a difficulty accepting those increased numbers because the current dormitory accommodation is limited to just 22. We don’t have unisex dorms. If we did, we could probably accommodate many more people. So we can only accommodate 22. So every year we have to turn away a significant number of women simply because we can’t physically accommodate them. This investment by this assistance from the US is going to be to remediate the existing plant.”

He explained that the new dormitories will accommodate 30 recruits from each sex, allowing the RPTC to add an extra 60 recruits to the 22 it can now accommodate.

“I can say that no options are off the table at this time. But naturally we prefer to try to recruit our police officers from among Barbadians. We’ve not taken a decision to recruit officers from outside of Barbados. But you will all know that Barbadian police officers have been recruited in fewer numbers now but in the past they’ve been recruited to go to work in BVI (British Virgin Islands), Bahamas, Bermuda. In recent times they’ve even been recruited to work for the US Embassy, which speaks to the quality of officers that we produce . . . .

“If our efforts at recruiting Barbadian officers don’t yield the fruit that we want, I believe the time will have come at that point to look to recruit officers from overseas. There are advantages to this but there are obviously some things that we’d have to figure out, housing and so on,” he said.

He said efforts were still under way to boost the constabulary’s overall number to 1 500 as he revealed that at present, it stood at 1 251 with an additional 46 special constables. “Perhaps our first point of analysis is trying to determine what is our optimum number as opposed to what is the number that has been in existence for 40 or 50 years. I would like to see us achieve that number because I think it will take pressure off the officers and it will allow us to concentrate resources of a more specialised nature into various departments. But that is the number we have and that is the number we want to reach,” he said about getting the police service to 1 500-strong.

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