An increased police presence was noticeable at the CUC Youth & CARIFTA Track and Field Championships over the weekend, in response to the shooting that took place on 25 Feb.
“It is no sense for us in trying to put the horse back into the stable when he’s already gone, so we are trying to ensure the presence of security is always around,” Sports Minister Isaac Rankine told the Compass, referring to the shooting at the Ed Bush Stadium during a football fixture, which left seven people nursing gunshot wounds.
Enhanced law enforcement was not limited to the weekend’s athletics meet but was also noted at various recent events, including the government school sports days.
It’s something Rankine said will continue moving forward.
“We are putting plans in place when large events are happening,” he said. “We will have some sort of police presence in addition to security guards for these events.”
He noted that parents, who felt a bit at risk because there weren’t any police seen on day one of the CARIFTA trials, had reached out to him.
As a result, Rankine said, “that led to me reaching out to the [police] commissioner, [Kurt Walton], … to alleviate the fears that some of the parents felt attending these trials.”
Compass staff counted three uniformed police officers at the track-and-field event, attended by more than 100 people, in addition to several security officers scattered on the outskirts of the stadium.
The sports minister added that he, Premier Juliana O’Connor-Connolly and Alfredo Whittaker, president of the Cayman Islands Football Association, all visited the Ed Bush Stadium earlier this week where the shooting occurred.
“It was a horrific incident – an incident that Cayman has never ever seen, and I hope we will never ever see it again,” Rankine said.
Asked about the ability of unarmed police and security officers to deal with potential armed criminals at large events, Rankine admitted that most will be unable to defend themselves against these types of perpetrators but hoped that their presence will serve as a deterrent.
“They’re not necessarily equipped to deal with it at the moment, but the police service does have a unit that specialises in cases where weapons are used,” he said.
“Having a criminal show up, who is intending on doing something, we can’t plan for that, and we don’t know how to deal with that right there and then,” he said.
“This is not what we want to come to. We were never like this, and we don’t want to be like this… but we have moved into a different phase in our history, and we cannot allow this to happen again,” Rankine said.
Whittaker recently told the Compass that he would be enhancing security at football matches going forward.
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