There have been no re­ports of se­ri­ous crimes against any of the 89,000 plus vis­i­tors who ar­rived on the is­land of To­ba­go over the last four months.

The achieve­ment is cred­it­ed to the “stead­fast and strate­gic con­cen­trat­ed pa­trols” of the men and women in the To­ba­go Di­vi­sion, par­tic­u­lar­ly the Tourism-Ori­ent­ed Polic­ing Sec­tion (TOPS), led by Cor­po­ral Wendy John.

Dur­ing the pe­ri­od No­vem­ber 11 to present, 49 cruise ships have docked at the To­ba­go Ports of Char­lot­teville and Scar­bor­ough with ap­prox­i­mate­ly 89,700 vis­i­tors. Dur­ing their short stay, they vis­it­ed places such as the Ad­ven­ture Farm and Na­ture Re­serve, Buc­coo Reef, Mt Irvine and Pi­geon Point Beach­es, Co­coa House, Ar­gyle Wa­ter­fall, To­ba­go Main Ridge For­est Re­serve and var­i­ous of the is­land's his­toric Fort, to name a few.

How­ev­er, be­fore their ar­rival and sub­se­quent tour­ing of the is­land, a blue­print of sev­er­al safe­ty and pre-emp­tive mea­sures are adopt­ed to en­sure the seam­less tran­si­tion from ship to site.

TOPS of­fi­cers, along with their coun­ter­parts at the Scar­bor­ough Po­lice Sta­tion and oth­er units, work to­geth­er with the is­land’s tourism and hos­pi­tal­i­ty stake­hold­ers, such as to host crime pre­ven­tion sem­i­nars and con­sul­ta­tions.

The re­sults, ac­cord­ing to Head of the TOPS, Cpl John, are ev­i­dent in the feed­back of vis­i­tors, who “usu­al­ly ex­press their feel­ings of how safe they feel and how friend­ly and kind the po­lice and the peo­ple of the is­land are.”

But this ac­com­plish­ment, she said, in­volves the sus­tained and con­cen­trat­ed pa­trol regime of foot, mo­bile, and e-bikes, in tan­dem with tour op­er­a­tors.

“As TOPS of­fi­cers, or po­lice of­fi­cers gen­er­al­ly, our main ob­jec­tive is to en­sure the safe­ty of our fel­low­men, but in this case, vis­i­tors and the cit­i­zens,” Cpl John said.

She added, “We are aware and are re­spond­ing to new crime trends on the is­land that seem to un­nerv­ing, but to have the up­per hand in this fight, we are mo­ti­vat­ed to en­sure that a proac­tive ap­proach of con­stant vis­i­bil­i­ty of pa­trols through­out the is­land.”

“While our re­mit fo­cus­es specif­i­cal­ly in ar­eas where the tourist tra­vers­es, as TOPS of­fi­cers, while on pa­trol we col­lab­o­rate with sup­port­ing units to ad­dress oth­er crimes that af­fect lo­cals as well and en­sure that our pres­ence is felt,” she ex­plained.

She clar­i­fied, “When we in­ter­act with our vis­i­tors, most of them em­brace us and en­cour­age us and al­ways tell us that they can’t wait to re­turn to the is­land.”