Speaking at a recent Bahamian Forum entitled “Crime: The Challenge to the Public and the Police,” Royal Bahamas Police Force (RBPF) Superintendent Keith Bell said tenth through twelfth graders are choosing to arm themselves with blades.
“The most popular weapon is the knife,” said Supt Bell. “Absolutely the pocket knife and even though they seem small, they can do just as much damage because some of them have big blades.”
An exclusive Guardian report last December also revealed, that students were attempting to smuggle guns into the government institutions. Still, Supt Bell was quick to add that officers in the School Policing Programme were doing a good job of clamping down on the illegal weapons. “It is having a significant impact,” Supt Bell said. “It is working very well and I commend the officers highly.”
But the RBPF officer also insisted that more can be done to improve the government-backed initiative. He said emphasis must be placed on “multi-agency co-operation.”
“I think the School Policing, much like Urban Renewal and the Tourism Policing Unit, shows the need for multi-agency co-operation,” Supt Bell explained. “It shows that we can achieve so much more if we come together and everyone has a role to play. I think that once we understand that and we put protocol in place, then we can make our society a better place.”
The school policing programme was implemented on September 5, 2005 and it runs at more than a dozen government high schools on the islands of New Providence, Grand Bahama and Abaco.
Ministries of National Security, Education and Social Services helped put the new initiative into action, after a string of violent incidents occurred at several government high schools during the 2004-2005 academic year.
The first took place in January 2005, when a group of young men jumped the R M Bailey Senior High school fence and started wielding cutlasses, after an angry parent was thrown off the school’s grounds.
In April of that year, a fight broke out at the C C Sweeting Junior High School between a male student and a teacher. That same month, a 15-year-old C V Bethel student was stabbed to death during a school yard brawl.
By: JASMIN BONIMY, The Nassau Guardian
