OTHER CARIBBEAN COUNTRIES WHINE

Barbados Advocate
December 8, 2005

ANY of the countries in the Caribbean region can be faced, as Aruba was recently, with the issue of visitor safety and security, as such, this will be the theme of the upcoming Association of Caribbean Commissioners of Police (ACCP) conference to be held in that Dutch territory next year.

Giving an outline of the draft agenda for the conference, Jeanette Richardson- Baar, Chief of Staff, to the Commissioner of Police of Aruba said that the conference will be a perfect opportunity to showcase to everyone abroad that Aruba still is a very safe and secure island to visit.

Her comments came as she spoke to those gathered for the final day of the ACCP Inter-sessional meeting at the Amaryllis Beach Resort yesterday. The image of Aruba in terms of visitor safety was very badly damaged by the Natalee Holloway case, which is a case that never happened in Aruba before. We do not have a lot of murders, we have four or five murders a year  most of them connected to drugs or criminals shooting each other ... for us it was very unusual, and we have been working very hard on it and we have been trying to do whatever we can to boost up the image of Aruba again, she said. With that in mind, Richardson-Baar noted that at any time, a similar situation could occur in another country in the region and so it is imperative that all the countries are well prepared.

One important issue that needs to be addressed, she stated, is how the authorities relate to the media, especially inter- national media entities. We have to train people more how to deal with the media. We have our information officers who are used to dealing with the local press and that is on a one-on-one basis. They all know each other, they dont make trouble and they know what to expect of each other. But we were confronted with CNN and FOX and people who have different ethics in terms of gathering information, she lamented.

As such, she explained that one of the items on the agenda for the conference will be Strategies for Effective Media Manage-ment, in which law enforcement officers will be trained so that if something like that was to happen in another country, that they would be able to deal with it effectively and efficiently. In addition to crime reporting and the media, the conference, she added, will look at three other main themes  regional crime and security, community-policing philosophy in action and major events management.