Geisha Kow­lessar

The ex­ec­u­tive of the Po­lice Ser­vice was heav­i­ly crit­i­cised yes­ter­day as Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er said there was a lack of ac­count­abil­i­ty in the or­gan­i­sa­tion. He al­so dis­missed re­ports that se­ri­ous crimes in West­ern Di­vi­sion were down, adding he was cer­tain that fear was on the in­crease.

Warn­er did so while ad­dress­ing mem­bers of the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty at yes­ter­day's Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce meet­ing. With­out giv­ing full de­tails of his much an­tic­i­pat­ed crime plan, the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter said it in­clud­ed:

• Re­vamp­ing the E-999 ser­vice

• In­tro­duc­ing com­mu­ni­ty-based sup­port of­fi­cers

• Soft and hard strate­gies

Warn­er said when his crime plan was ful­ly un­veiled, he did not want peo­ple call­ing it the Warn­er plan. He said he in­tend­ed to write to his pre­de­ces­sors John Sandy, Mar­tin Joseph and Howard Chin Lee to de­ter­mine whether they want­ed to make an in­put. On the short­age of po­lice ve­hi­cles and those wait­ing to be re­paired, Warn­er said this was a se­ri­ous im­ped­i­ment to fight crime.

Say­ing there was no mag­ic pill to tack­le crim­i­nal el­e­ments, Warn­er in­sist­ed that a com­bi­na­tion of strate­gies was need­ed. He said po­lice at the Arou­ca sta­tion re­ceived in­for­ma­tion about the where­abouts of mur­der sus­pects linked to the Cara­po triple mur­der on Tues­day. "But when they get in the car and they start it...it can't start, the trans­mis­sion gone."

Warn­er said when the po­lice tried to use an­oth­er car, it had no brakes. "Where is the ac­count­abil­i­ty?" Warn­er ques­tioned. De­scrib­ing the E-999 ser­vice as crit­i­cal, he added: "We would up­date our call cen­tre and...put some kind of sanc­ti­ty in the emer­gency calls, which must be at­tend­ed." The in­tro­duc­tion of the com­mu­ni­ty po­lice sup­port of­fi­cers, he added, would ul­ti­mate­ly al­le­vi­ate fears and cre­ate pub­lic con­fi­dence in the Po­lice Ser­vice.

Ad­mit­ting that pub­lic safe­ty was one of the most crit­i­cal is­sues fac­ing the na­tion, Warn­er added: "Your con­cern of crime is jus­ti­fied, be­cause it in­volves not just loss­es, (but al­so) hard­ship, trau­ma, vi­o­lence, suf­fer­ing, in­jury, grief and loss of life." On the hard and soft ap­proach­es, the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter said these must work in tan­dem.

Say­ing the soft ap­proach was the so­cial ap­proach, Warn­er said: "We can­not ig­nore the fact that fail­ures in the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem and oth­er sys­tems in so­ci­ety have led to a large num­ber of peo­ple be­ing un­em­ployed and un­em­ploy­able. "We can­not ig­nore the fact that there are hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple liv­ing be­low the pover­ty line who can eas­i­ly find them­selves at a precipice won­der­ing how to feed their hun­gry chil­dren."

Warn­er said the soft­er ap­proach al­so in­volved go­ing in­to com­mu­ni­ties and demon­strat­ing that pos­i­tive opin­ions ex­ist. The Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter al­so shot back at his de­trac­tors who crit­i­cised his seem­ing lack of ac­tion. "The ob­jec­tive of these meet­ings is to eval­u­ate what I have to work with," he said. "We have looked at the hu­man re­sources, equip­ment, tech­nol­o­gy and oth­er re­source is­sues.

"We have dis­cussed prob­lems and strate­gies. We have eval­u­at­ed old strate­gies to see what we can learn from them." Warn­er said he in­tend­ed to beef up the num­ber of ve­hi­cles in the Po­lice Ser­vice. He warned, how­ev­er, "I have in­struct­ed that all the air-con­di­tion units be re­moved from the ve­hi­cles. "The days for air-con­di­tion po­lice...that done."