By Sharon Austin
BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (GIS) – Approximately 120 members of The Barbados Police Service (TBPS) and the Barbados Defence Force (BDF) are currently undergoing intensive training in preparation for the 2024 International Cricket Council (ICC) Men’s T20 World Cup.
The two-week training, which started last week, is being facilitated by a team from Mowbray Partners, United Kingdom (UK). It is being held at the Regional Police Training Centre (RPTC), Seawell, Christ Church.
Attorney General Dale Marshall visited the RPTC earlier today and spoke to the participants and watched them demonstrate their enhanced skills.
In underscoring the importance of the training, Marshall said he recently returned from a meeting of ministers of national security and attorney-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. 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,” the attorney-general stressed his commitment to members of The Barbados Police Service receiving the finest training and being exposed to cutting-edge technology. He added that he was pleased TBPS and BDF could train together, as both entities were critical to the safety of Barbados.
Marshall continued: “The success of this particular venture, which really represents a continuation of something that we’ve started with the Durham Constabulary a few years ago, will make possible future interventions into the imparting of cutting-edge skills to our security forces,” and thanked the officers and soldiers for their commitment and encouraged them to take advantage of the training.
At the end of the simulation, attorney-general Marshall stated: “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.”
Meanwhile, in giving the background to 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 the importance of this type of on-island training, stating that more local personnel were given the opportunity to be exposed to the exercises.
