By LEANDRA ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

lrolle@tribunemedia.net

NATIONAL Security Minister Wayne Munroe dismissed a manpower audit that found the RBPF is top-heavy, saying the auditors didn’t have any leadership experience in policing.

His criticism of the audit came while defending the high number of assistant commissioners in the country after recent promotional exercises brought the number to 14.

A manpower audit in 2018 found that there only needed to be six assistant commissioners.

“I wouldn’t call it a manpower audit,” Mr Munroe told The Tribune yesterday about the report. “Nobody on it had any command experience of a force. You don’t get people who are corporals and sergeants. Right. So when I looked at it, that’s the first issue.”

He said someone with leadership experience will perform an ongoing defence force audit.

The Research and Development Section of the Ministry of National Security created the manpower audit.

Mr Munroe said the audit team should’ve been headed by a retired commissioner from another country or someone with executive leadership experience.

The minister also dismissed the report’s comparisons of The Bahamas’ police force to other countries, citing differences in landmass.

According to the Jamaican Constabulary Force’s website, Jamaica’s national police force has six assistant commissioners. The Metropolitan Police Service, the United Kingdom’s largest police force with more than 47,000 officers, has seven.

Mr Munroe said: “The Bahamas has twenty-plus international airports. We probably have like 30 or 35 occupied cays spread over 100,000 square miles. In the report themselves, they point out that that’s a significant difference between us in Barbados, us in Trinidad, us in Jamaica.”

“Barbados is one landmass, Jamaica is one landmass, Trinidad and Tobago are two.”

He noted auditors also complained about the lack of ACPs who had portfolios –– an issue he said doesn’t apply to the current command team.

“All of the assistant commissioners of police have portfolios,” he said. “So if somebody is going to complain about them, I would expect it to be insofar as you look at their portfolio and say there’s no need for us as the police commissioner to have this portfolio.”

Mr Munroe said the police service commission approved the promotions, a body made up of retired senior police.

While defending the promotions last month, Commissioner Clayton Fernander said more senior people are needed in growing Family Islands and at the head of police stations.

“What you will see now is an assistant commissioner of police is in charge of two stations, and we will have a command structure across the board,” he said.