The recently completed law-enforcement review offers an extensive 10-year plan to solve appalling security failures caused by decades of underfunding and other neglect by the United Kingdom and Virgin Islands governments alike.
The strategy is mostly reasonable (if so expensive that we wonder how in the world it will ever get done).
However, leaders must find alternatives to recommendations that involve the UK clawing back powers previously devolved to the VI government.
First, though, it is important to acknowledge what the review got right.
This list is extensive. Citing carefully documented evidence, the report by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services paints a damning picture of a territory where criminals operate with impunity; the risk of corruption is far too high; the human rights of suspects and migrants including children are routinely violated; and citizens’ overall security is at risk in various ways.
We don’t doubt these conclusions.
The UK team’s extensive research, after all, is supported by reams of other information in the public domain (not least the shameful fiasco of the 2022 arrest of the territory’s then-premier and ports leader in Miami).
The review should be treated accordingly, and not, as some House of Assembly members have intimated, as a UK conspiracy to unfairly tarnish the territory’s reputation. (This claim is especially hollow given that the report is every bit as hard on the UK as it is on the VI.)
Indeed, it is high time that the VI’s security issues, many of which have been open secrets for decades, be candidly acknowledged so that the process of fixing them can begin in earnest and the public can rest assured of its safety.
To that end, the report’s second volume, which was published last week, provides a valuable service by offering a 10-year road map that will touch not only this territory but all UK territories in the region. The 375 longer-term recommendations in Volume Two are extremely wide-ranging, and the great majority of them are sound and well-conceived.
However, there are a few exceptions. The most glaring is a high-level recommendation that HOA members have rightly criticised in recent days: returning certain devolved powers — including responsibility for customs, immigration and financial investigations — to the governor.
This recommendation might make sense if the police force, which has been under the governor’s control for decades, had been operating smoothly.
But that is not the case. In fact, the review’s findings about the police are every bit as scathing as its findings about customs, immigration and other agencies under the government’s control.
Clearly, then, the larger problems are systemic and involve the governor and UK side as much as the local government side. It therefore seems illogical to suggest that certain agencies are failing because they are under the control of the VI government instead of the governor.
It is similarly illogical to suggest that a main remedy for those failings is to move these agencies back to the governor.
Worse, this move would be a big step backward at a time when the territory should be moving toward greater autonomy through its coming constitutional review.
Instead, the UK and VI governments should work together in good faith to find a way around recommendations that involve expanding UK powers here.
As part of that process, they also must comb through other recommendations that may compromise the territory. For instance, the review’s call to close sister-island ports to international traffic seems likely to damage the economy in ways that the UK inspectors may not have considered as part of their mandate.
HOA members rightly plan to write the UK to oppose such recommendations and offer alternatives. Starting now, the way forward must involve community input and full transparency from the VI and UK governments alike.
Then there’s the question of funding. Implementing the recommendations — which include a new Halls of Justice and a 90-member marine agency that would operate 24 hours a day, to name just two — will surely cost in excess of $100 million.
The UK will need to put its money where its mouth is by assisting with these expenditures.
UK and VI leaders have long promised to work together to establish a “modern partnership.” That promise is being put to the test once again.
