National Security Minister brigadier general Carl Alfonso says he will use the combined strength of the nation’s armed forces to flush out, capture, arrest and make available for prosecution deviants in this country who believe they can strike fear in the hearts of law enforcement officers and bring the country under siege.
In a Sunday Guardian interview that dealt with recent disturbances within the nation’s prisons system and reports of death threats made on the lives of correctional officers, the minister said the nation’s security apparatus would not abandon prisons officers now that they were “under the gun” as criminals threaten their lives.
“They seem to want to be looking for a war. They seem to be targeting all law enforcement people; everybody who wears a uniform, whether it’s Defence Force, police, prisons or fire. For all those law enforcement people who work as hard as they do to be now under this threat from people who are murderers and gangsters and so on, you are trying to control this country and I don’t think the law enforcement fraternity is going to allow this,” Alfonso said.
“They are under threat! What is happening in the prisons needs everybody’s attention. The law enforcement fraternity have to get together and try and control that situation in the prisons. Prisons authorities alone can’t do it. It has gone a little too far for them alone to handle it. The Commissioner of Prisons knows he has the support of the Defence Force and the police. Once he requires it and he asks for it, they will go in and do what they have to do.”
Citing growing concerns with respect to the safety of correctional officers, the minister said he supported the call for the officers to be allowed to take home their firearms.