RCIPS calling: Answer on the first ring

The Royal Cayman Islands Police Service could, and should, do a much better job at communicating with the public, both through the news media and also directly. Everybody knows that — including the police officers.

So we are quite pleased to learn that the police have adopted a new policy where officers will regularly notify victims of crime as to the status of investigations. While all the details haven’t yet crystallized, the new policy is undeniably a positive step toward improving the relationship between the police and the community.

If implemented properly, the policy should do much to address commonly expressed frustrations from victims of crime that, after they make their initial police report, nothing happens – or at least, nothing seems to, as far as they can tell. In the past, some people have gone months without hearing anything from police, even when the suspect has been arrested and brought before court for trial.

Many crimes, of course, are in reality practically unsolvable, but most people realize that and won’t begrudge police officers for falling short of omnipotence — and a brief phone call can bestow large psychological benefits to victims who, at a minimum, desire confirmation that Cayman’s police actually “care, listen and act.”

Let us take a moment here to stipulate that members of the public could also make greater efforts to engage the police — and that nearly all police officers, as individuals, truly do care, or else they wouldn’t have committed themselves to the very difficult and often thankless vocation of trying to keep the peace.

Compass reporters maintain strong and beneficial relationships with many police officers; further, for the past several years Compass copublisher Vicki Legge has organized the annual RCIPS Awards gala at The Ritz-Carlton, Grand Cayman, with proceeds benefiting the Police Welfare Fund — a most worthy cause indeed.

The problems that Cayman’s police have with public communications exist at an organizational level – but those problems are not limited to liaising with victims on their specific cases.

For example, a few days ago, Cayman’s emergency 911 system — overseen by the Information and Communications Technology Authority, and run by Digicel and LIME — went down. As of today, we still don’t know how long 911 was down; ICTA’s estimates range from 4 to 14 hours, during which time no emergency calls could be made.

The 911 outage should have been treated as news to be relayed immediately to all media houses as a public service. We would have posted the information on our website (caymancompass.com), and we presume other media outlets would have done the same. Radio and television stations, we’re confident, would have also immediately disseminated the information.

Instead, it was kept quiet. Who knows what preventable tragedies could have occurred because of this failure to communicate?

Additionally, we now know about the recent rash of break-ins and burglaries targeting Seven Mile Beach businesses, but that information was not initially shared by police.

In major cities, the gold standard for police communication has evolved into the production of interactive maps that illustrate, at a block-by-block level and in near-real time, where crimes are occurring so that people can adapt their behavior accordingly. At a minimum, Cayman’s police should be maintaining publicly accessible open records identifying who has been arrested, and for what offenses.

We are mindful that the first responsibility of the RCIPS is policing, not public relations, but a department so dependent on the public for assistance in gathering information and evidence — and ultimately testifying in court — needs an open, and honest, channel of communication with the people it serves.

For our part at the Compass, let there be no doubt: Yes, we are vigilant and at times critical of the performance of the RCIPS but, at the end of the day, we are “pro police.” So should be the people of these islands.