Barbados’ security forces are undergoing intensive training in preparation for the International Cricket Council (ICC) Men’s T20 World Cup to be held here in June.
Approximately 120 members of The Barbados Police Service (TBPS) and the Barbados Defence Force (BDF) are participating in a two-week training exercise which started last week and is being facilitated by a team from Mowbray Partners, United Kingdom (UK), at the Regional Police Training Centre (RPTC), Seawell, Christ Church.
Attorney General Dale Marshall visited the RPTC on Tuesday, spoke to the participants and watched them demonstrate their enhanced skills.
Underscoring the importance of the training, he said he recently returned from a meeting of Ministers of National Security and Attorneys General in Trinidad where they continued the process of reviewing security arrangements for Cricket World Cup.
“Your specialist training is going to contribute in no small measure to the safety of Barbadians, our visitors, and to the safety of our country as a whole,” Marshall told the police and BDF officers.
“This exercise is about firstly ensuring the best readiness stance for Cricket World Cup, but more important than that is the legacy that this training will provide. The matters that the officers are being trained for are things that can happen in the ordinary course of the average day in Barbados. So, while we are targeting training for Cricket World Cup, we do have to make sure that officers are able to respond at any time, and that’s the significance of what we’re doing.”
He stressed his commitment to members of TBPS receiving the finest training and being exposed to cutting-edge technology.
The Attorney General added that he was pleased that the TBPS and BDF could train together, as both entities were critical to the safety of Barbados.
“The success of this particular venture, which really represents a continuation of something that we’ve started withthe Durham Constabulary a few years ago, will make possible future interventions into the imparting of cutting-edge skills to our security forces,” he continued.
He thanked the officers and soldiers for their commitment and encouraged them to take advantage of the training.
At the end of the simulation, Marshall expressed satisfaction with what he had witnessed: “I am impressed with the level of training and the response from the officers of The Barbados Police Service and the BDF to that training. I am pleased at what I have seen this morning.
“We are currently in discussion to see how we can add a number of programmes and have the entity that’s doing the training now come back to do an even higher level of training.”
Providing background on the training, Director of the Anti- Corruption and Anti-Terrorism Agency, Darwin Dottin, who is assisting with the planning, said preparation for Cricket World Cup started with a risk assessment.
“We go through that process of understanding what are the security risks that are likely to engage us for the games. A risk assessment is not a mathematical exercise; it is for judgement; it is based on intelligence and so on, and to back that up we have a number of contingency plans….
“We did an assessment of the capabilities of The Barbados Police Service, along with the BDF, and we took a decision that we needed to enhance our public order training. So, this is a group [of trainers] from the UK that we’ve used before for higher-order training,” Dottin explained.
He stressed the importance of this type of on-island training, noting that more local personnel were given the opportunity to be exposed to the exercises. (BGIS/BT)
