Charles Kong Soo

There is a de­lib­er­ate ploy to un­der­mine the op­er­a­tions of the Cus­toms di­vi­sion at the Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port in or­der to jus­ti­fy pri­vatis­ing the di­vi­sion.A source said this was done by se­vere­ly un­der-staffing, pro­vid­ing in­ad­e­quate re­sources, and not re­pair­ing vi­tal equip­ment such as scan­ners at the air­port. The move to pri­va­tise the unit, sources claimed, was head­ed by a gov­ern­ment of­fi­cial.

Ac­cord­ing to the source, "There are two scan­ners down out of four, and we don't know what is the keep back in re­pair­ing them. Peo­ple on the out­side wouldn't know what is go­ing on."The source said there were on­ly three per­son­nel in the Cus­toms pre­ven­tive branch at the air­port, one of­fi­cer and two guards, and the chron­ic un­der­staffing had been go­ing on for years.

The source said train­ing was not an is­sue as cus­toms of­fi­cers re­ceived "enor­mous" train­ing from lo­cal and for­eign au­thor­i­ties such as the US, British and Ja­maican Cus­toms de­part­ments, but what they learn was not be­ing put in­to prac­tice.A source said ju­nior of­fi­cers and peo­ple in mid­dle man­age­ment were keen to im­ple­ment new pro­ce­dure and tech­niques, but the se­nior of­fi­cers with "old colo­nial mind­sets" were mak­ing it dif­fi­cult for them.

The source said the se­nior of­fi­cers were just go­ing through the mo­tion dai­ly and are not will­ing to go the ex­tra mile in de­tec­tion work. He said they were hop­ing to see some changes when the se­nior of­fi­cers went on re­tire­ment. The source said, "All the se­niors had to con­tend with in their time was al­co­hol and cig­a­rette smug­gling. In this era there is drugs, firearms, coun­ter­feit goods, con­tra­band and an­i­mal smug­gling to deal with."

He said there were cus­toms of­fi­cers who were trained well, but they lacked co-op­er­a­tion and sup­port from their se­niors.The source said there was too much bu­reau­cra­cy in the or­gan­i­sa­tion.He said the po­lice were al­so step­ping slow­ly but sure­ly in­to some of the cus­toms of­fi­cers' ju­ris­dic­tion, cre­at­ing a bit of a turf war, but some se­nior cus­toms of­fi­cers were try­ing to guard against that.Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Gary Grif­fith could not be con­tact­ed up to late yes­ter­day for a com­ment. Sev­er­al calls to his cell­phone went unan­swered.