The Tribune

By KHRISNA RUSSELL

Tribune Chief Reporter

krussell@tribunemedia.net

OUTGOING police commissioner Paul Rolle has recalled the push back he received from the Minnis administration over a $750,000 bill the Royal Bahamas Police Force racked up from around-the-clock policing during lockdowns at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

During that time Mr Rolle also said there was a lot of confusion among officers due to the rapidly changing Emergency Powers Orders.

“This thing was changing while you were in flight,” Mr Rolle said of the orders and whether there had been any friction with government over how he chose to administrate and navigate the RBPF in the early days of the pandemic.

“We had difficulty keeping up with them.”

Mr Rolle sat down with The Tribune earlier this week in his final days as Commissioner. He will retire on July 5 and officially hand over the post to Deputy Commissioner Clayton Fernander. Mr Rolle became Commissioner on March 30, 2020.

“One of the big challenging things I had was - remember now, you are in lockdown and so restaurants were closed, officers were working around the clock,” Mr Rolle said. “I had to feed them. So, I had to bring in the canteen staff and we were doing about 1,000 meals a day because you had to cover all of the shifts, a little over a thousand and then we had the defence force join to assist. So, I had to feed them as well because no restaurants were open.

“That was a herculean task to feed them and you know then we had the night shifts and produce lighter meals for them and keep the water flowing, that was very costly.

“I think we must have spent, the first bill I submitted to the government was $750,000. Then they started to say ‘Why did you spend all this money?’

“I said ‘listen man we had to feed these people. We are in lockdown. That first lock down I think was 14 days and so you could imagine feeding 1,000 persons a day and that was only breakfast and lunches - thousand meals.

“You know the breakfast was like $8 and lunch was $15. So, multiply that. That’s like $23,000 per day. So, you see how that adds up?”

Regarding emergency powers orders, Mr Rolle said as the rules began to change really fast, there was confusion.

“See we had the emergency powers orders. I think it was more for me to interpret and I had them asking me what this means and so I had to interpret that for the officers.

“When the orders started changing and I’m like, y’all have to give us time, you know. Y’all are changing these orders so fast and I have these officers out there we don’t have time to have meetings to educate these officers. Then what happened is there were officers who started to be in breach because they were operating under old orders and this thing was changing while you were in flight. Then you would get complaints from the public and then the public started getting annoyed because they were reading and they had their consults and we would have lawyers call but the message wasn’t getting out fast enough.

“There were times when the orders would change twice, three times in a week. We had difficulty keeping up with them.”