(CMR) An internal Foreign Office investigation has revealed that the Turks and Caicos Islands was engulfed by extreme violence last year amid a turf war for control of drug trafficking routes.
According to The Guardian, the investigation revealed that TCI's local police force was “overwhelmed” by the carnage, as feuding gangs discharged automatic rifles in the streets.
The report also identified a string of failures in the Royal Turks and Caicos Police Force, including limited forensic abilities, no management structures for serious incidents, and a bizarre insistence on recording crime data in a spreadsheet rather than a British government database shared with other police forces in the region, The Guardian stated.
Sheffield Hallam University also reported widespread public mistrust towards state institutions, including “police-community legitimacy gap.”
Sources told the Guardian several warnings about police incompetence and possible corruption had been communicated to the office of the governor.
The Foreign Office review, tasked with assessing the islands’ ability to respond to serious crimes such as murder and robbery, reported its findings in November 2022. By that stage, warfare between rival gangs had claimed 31 lives – compared with four murders in 2017.
“The scale of threat posed by serious crime has overwhelmed the capacity and capabilities of the Royal Turks and Caicos Islands Police Force. The levels of murder, violent crime and use of firearms significantly exceed anything experienced by the UK, or any other British overseas territory,” the report stated.
Notably, the review was commissioned in March and based on fieldwork conducted in the summer – several months before gang violence erupted in the autumn.
The Foreign Office declined to say what had prompted the report to be commissioned. However, the Guardian reported that illegal migration to the Turks and Caicos (TCI), which has risen sharply in recent years as a result of small boats from Haiti and Jamaica, was an “aggravating factor” behind the rise in serious crime.
Three months after the Foreign Office report was completed, the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice at Sheffield Hallam University reported similarly concerning findings from its own inquiry into the root causes of serious crime on the islands.
“Corruption is widely recognized across TCI’s public service system by interview participants [and] survey respondents. So endemic was the problem that islanders believed corruption was “the second most important crime concern to address on the islands after the murder,” it said.
Some of those the academics interviewed described fears that any information they supplied to police would immediately be reported back to the perpetrators.
One respondent said: “There are rumors that at least the last three people who have been killed had given information to the police, and that these people somehow were targeted because they brought information to police.
“There’s always been this widely circulated notion that … there’s corrupt police, and they’re leaking the information to the criminals, and these criminals are going back to the people and are subsequently killing these people.”
Despite police management having been sent on specific training for serious incident response, the investigators found “no identifiable application” of the principles they had supposedly been taught. “Policy logs, meeting structures or defined roles” for responding to serious incidents were missing.
Governor Dileeni Daniel-Selvaratnam said the islands were facing “serious threats from transnational crime and irregular migration” and that she had sought better collaboration between law enforcement agencies and greater external support since her appointment.
“As governor of the Turks and Caicos Islands, I am committed to tackling allegations of corruption or poor practice head on,” she said, adding that the current police commissioner would retire shortly.
“A key focus of my recruitment of his successor will be the reinforcement of policing standards, and a strong ethical framework of conduct and performance for the Royal Turks and Caicos Islands Police Force,” she added.
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