Act­ing Pris­ons Com­mis­sion­er Hay­den Forde says the preva­lence of drone sight­ings and use of the de­vices to try and smug­gle items in­to pris­ons has led to dis­cus­sions over an­ti-drone equip­ment at prison fa­cil­i­ties.

On Fri­day, a joint ex­er­cise be­tween the prison ser­vice, the TTPS and the de­fence force led to the ar­rest of two peo­ple, one of which was a 13-year-old boy.

The duo, po­lice said tried to fly a drone laden with mar­i­jua­na, cig­a­rettes, wrap­ping pa­per and cell­phones in­to the Arou­ca Max­i­mum Se­cu­ri­ty Prison.

Days ear­li­er on Sep­tem­ber 28, three men try­ing to fly sim­i­lar items in­to the same prison.

Con­tact­ed for com­ment Forde re­port­ed that since April, there have been 626 drone sight­ings near prison fa­cil­i­ties and said such a high num­ber of the phe­nom­e­non was cause for con­cern.

He con­firmed that talks were on­go­ing with Min­is­ter of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Roger Alexan­der on what mea­sures could be tak­en to coun­ter­act drone smug­gling.

Re­fer­ring to cas­es where an­ti-drone nets could be used to cap­ture drones, Forde said while these mea­sures would be use­ful there were oth­er con­sid­er­a­tions be­ing en­ter­tained.

“What is re­al­ly need­ed are an­ti-drone de­vices that are in a fixed place, but can cov­er a cer­tain ra­dius and any drone which comes in­to that place, the de­vice can de­tect it, cap­ture it, defuse it, it can send it back to the op­er­a­tor where th po­lice can fol­low the drone and make an ar­rest if po­lice.

So hav­ing the net is one thing, which is good, but it re­quires a cer­tain lev­el of dex­ter­i­ty from the pi­lot, but if you have some­thing fixed that means you can deal with drones at any time of the day.”

Forde al­so ad­mit­ted that he was par­tic­u­lar­ly con­cerned about the age of the sus­pect held in the most re­cent in­ci­dent, not­ing that it was an ex­am­ple of crim­i­nals re­cruit­ing and in­clud­ing younger per­sons in their ac­tiv­i­ties.

“It seems as though they (crim­i­nals) are train­ing peo­ple to get in­volved in crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ties and con­tin­ue on that line.

“That is alarm­ing to us as a so­ci­ety, be­cause ba­si­cal­ly what they’re do­ing is suc­ces­sion plan­ning, so it means that the crim­i­nal el­e­ments are en­sur­ing that crime is not abat­ed in this coun­try and young peo­ple whose minds are bent eas­i­ly, they are us­ing these peo­ple and re­cruit­ing them to con­tin­ue their ne­far­i­ous ac­tiv­i­ties.”

Com­ment­ing on the re­cent ad­di­tion of the prison ser­vice as part of the list of re­spon­si­bil­i­ties for Min­is­ter Alexan­der, Forde said he was pleased with this de­vel­op­ment and was op­ti­mistic that the Min­is­ter’s years of ex­pe­ri­ence in polic­ing would be an as­set in un­der­stand­ing and cre­at­ing strate­gies for stronger se­cu­ri­ty.