The Tribune

By KHRISNA RUSSELL

Tribune Chief Reporter

krussell@tribunemedia.net

SINCE the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, 246 Royal Bahamas Police Force officers have contracted the virus.

Police Commissioner Paul Rolle told reporters yesterday this included five new cases over the past week.

He said most of the force’s areas had seen infections.

Commissioner Rolle was asked to respond to complaints that there had been cases in the Drug Enforcement Unit.

“I don’t know about that,” he said in response to a question. “We’ve had cases throughout the police force over time and I did my report yesterday, which I filed with the minister.

“I believe the running count would have been 246 to date and last week it was 241 so you do the math.

“That’s for the whole police force, I think we recorded about five and so we are still concerned about that, although it’s only five for the week. We try to take steps to mitigate as much as possible.

“We’ve seen the numbers really gone down within the ranks and that’s throughout.”

He continued: “I believe most of the areas in the force have been touched.

“I don’t want to specify areas, but I am saying we are not immune.”

Regarding the RBPF’s curfew enforcement strategy, the police chief said patrols had been beefed up.

“We have a few of the checkpoints as I said earlier in one of my previous addresses that we adjust as we go along.

“As we found that persons have been more and more compliant, we put minimal stationary points, but we have increased the police presence nonetheless by mobile patrols so now we have per shift I would say it’s about 45/50 patrol cars.

“Some are marked, some are under cover, but we’ll catch (you).”

Commissioner Rolle also commended the public for complying with restrictions.

“At some point people will get the message that what they’re doing is wrong.

“I must commend the community because it seems to me that the message is getting through and we have seen fewer of the breaches with persons having parties and those large social gatherings, but we still want to encourage them to continue to abide by them.

“I know on the weekend it was Halloween and so we had a lot of reports of fireworks, but we have our officers out and about and I think one or two incidents where we had to deal with rowdy people who thought we were encroaching on their fun, but that’s nothing major.”