Deputy Police Commissioner Kurt Walton says plans are in the works to add more cameras to the local CCTV network to eliminate blind spots and help police in their crime-detection efforts.
Walton, speaking on last week’s episode of the Cayman Compass Facebook talkshow ‘The Resh Hour’, said the existing network of CCTV cameras has been a “massive” resource for investigating everything from collisions to the commission of crimes.
However, he said, there are some key spots that require additional coverage that will help with police probes.
To this end, he said, the Royal Cayman Islands Police Service is collaborating with the Home Affairs Ministry as well as the Department of Public Safety on procuring additional cameras.
“This is primarily for criminal investigations,” Walton said, noting that police have recognised that in a number of serious crimes, “there are certain gaps” in CCTV coverage, with the RCIPS providing a list of those locations to the director of the Department of Public Safety “to start looking at how we can fill those gaps”.
He did not say how many cameras he is requesting, but said it is “not a lot”.
He added that what is important is not the quantity of cameras, but the impact they will have.
“It certainly would be beneficial to have it in certain areas for our investigators,” Walton said.
Speed cameras in the works
As for the creation of a network of speed cameras, he said work continues to make that happen, but added it is not an easy task as it will require collaboration with a number of agencies and use a lot of resources.
“It’s not as simple as putting up speed cameras,” he said, noting as an example that it was “a real big project” to capture information to enable tickets to be sent through the postal service.
“How do you know who’s in the vehicle? Just capturing all the data, the storage of the data, the back office work behind that project… the entire infrastructure… it’s going to take a project management team with technical skills.”
At this point, he said the project is a “scoping exercise” looking at such things as costs and infrastructure, and therefore he could not provide a timeline for the creation of a speed-camera network.
However, he added it is a project that is being looked into as part of the broader picture of road safety in the Cayman Islands.
“This is not just a police project. Because of the massive amount of infrastructure behind speed cameras, it takes a holistic approach for that project to become a reality. So we would be huge supporters of it, but it’s not solely a police project… [I]t’s a massive amount of work, but it’s ongoing,” Walton said.
While work on the cameras progresses, police will continue proactive patrols and monitor speed traps, he said, adding that keeping the community safe is an RCIPS priority.
The recent rise in robberies, the latest occurring over this past weekend, has been a matter of concern for police, Walton said.
Heightened police visibility
As the community heads into the holiday season the annual ‘Winter Guardian’ exercise, which began 1 Dec., will increase visibility and help with crime detection and prevention, he said.
The police are “doing everything [they] can possibly do to prevent” an increase in robberies, Walton said. “We’ve got teams that are doing specialist patrols in certain areas. I’m not one to say it’s not going to happen… but certainly we’ll do everything we can possibly do to prevent it happening,” he said, as he discussed the possibility of more such crimes occurring over the holidays.
However, Walton had a message for the people who are committing these crimes.
“Irrespective of your economic situation, it is unacceptable that you think it’s okay because you’re having a tough time economically, to walk into a store armed with a a gun and point it to a teller’s head or to a clerk’s head inside of a small grocery store,” he said.
The community, he said, needs to move away from accepting that there are people that maybe have had a hard time in life and “understand that we have individuals on this island and their intent is just to be involved in criminality”.
“Our job is really to do everything we can to do either prevent them or to detect what they’re doing,” he said.
Spate of robberies
Referring to the recent spate of robberies, he said police are working diligently to make a dent in the number of those acts occurring, with the crimes over this last weekend taking the tally for the year to date to 40 robberies.
From August to the end of November, 25 robberies were recorded. Walton said police are looking at three groups of around 10 to 12 individuals each who are loosely connected as the culprits.
“[Those groups are] really causing us concern at the moment and those are the individuals we are targeting,” he said.
He explained that one of those groups is focusing on operators of illegal lottery numbers on island.
“[The] second group is primarily using a machete or an axe… and they’re targeting primarily individuals – street robberies as you would you normally call those – and you’ve got a third group that [is] armed,” he said.
That last group, he said, usually comprises between four and six people working together and they possess firearms.
“They’re out there committing robberies where they’re targeting some small business owners in the early evening into the night,” he said.
Search warrants were recently executed and individuals from that group have been arrested and/or warrants carried out at their addresses, Walton said.
Police have also recovered material during those searches that is to be analysed, he added.
Related Videos
