Had the United Progressive Party (UPP) won April's general election, it says the fight against crime would have begun with increased security at the ports, a substantially resourced police force and forensic laboratory.
That was the message from Opposition Leader Jamale Pringle, St Paul caretaker Franz DeFreitas and Senator Jonathan Wehner on Observer Radio's The Big Issues on Sunday, as the country grapples with a slew of shootings – including the shooting of several youths and the August 9 shooting of Chinese investor Yida Zhang at his Crabbs Peninsula compound – as the Royal Police Force rolls out Operation Restore Confidence.
Host Barbara Arrindell put the programme's central question bluntly: "If the UPP were the government today, what would it be doing differently? "
"That's where it starts": Securing the Border
MP Pringle said the government has been "normally reactive rather than proactive" and that he sees no plan to stop illegal firearms entering the country.
"I am not seeing a clear strategy as to how the government intends to deal with the importation of illegal firearms," he said. "All I'm hearing is a blame game by the Prime Minister."
"We would have invested in technology and equipment to properly secure our borders, because that's where it starts," MP Pringle said. "We have to ensure that our customs officers, our immigration officers, our police officers are properly equipped with the necessary tools and equipment they need to be effective."
He added that intelligence depends on public trust: "We have to go back to strengthening the relationship between community and the police. Otherwise, police cannot act efficiently without information coming from the public." The Opposition Leader said the laws themselves need revamping, because "we cannot sit down and wait until a life is taken by a firearm to address the situation. We should prevent it."
'Intelligence that is not acted upon'
Senator Jonathan Wehner, the party's acting public relations officer, went further, suggesting the authorities must already have some idea who is bringing guns into the country.
"We know guns are not manufactured here in Antigua and Barbuda," he said. "Are you trying to tell me that after all these years, the law enforcement agencies – from the ONDCP to the police force to all the different special units, and customs – have no clue who are the individuals bringing in illegal firearms?"
Drug busts at the airport and seaport make the news, he said, but "you don't hear about individuals being arrested because they are being investigated, or brought in for questioning, or charged with smuggling illegal firearms into this country." He said he could not recall a single such case.
Senator Wehner then read from the police force's own entry in the 2025 Budget Estimates, in which the force listed its "critical issues": inadequate facilities and office space; the unavailability of the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), which he said means prints lifted from crime scenes have no operational database to be matched against; dilapidated police buildings; "inaccessible funds allocated for police operations"; and "equipment shortages, insufficient uniforms and malfunctioning communication devices".
"Ask them [police officers] if they have to pay for their own uniforms," he said. "The Minister of Finance is saying one thing, the Minister of Public Safety is saying one thing, but when the rubber hits the road and it's time for the signature to go on the cheque, they [the police force] can't get the money."
"Then the Prime Minister has the gumption to say the police force is not performing, to say the ONDCP is not performing. When you know, as Minister of Finance, that you don't give them the proper resources needed to fight crime," Senator Wehner said.
Forensic Lab 'Pending' for a Decade
DeFreitas read from the 2023 budgetestimates, in which the Antigua and Barbuda Forensic Services (ABFS) reported that it had applied to cabinet, the Ministries of Works and Health, the Social Security Scheme and others on at least 10 occasions since 2016 for a building from which to operate a laboratory – and that every request was declined.
"I am sure right now that if we had a lab that could track fingerprints, if we had a lab that could run ballistics on guns, if we had a lab that could just do normal police work, we would see less crime, because we would solve the crime and catch the criminals," he said.
Then came his sharpest charge regarding the forensic lab: "The reason no forensic lab exists in Antigua and Barbuda is because it would actually identify who is in crime. Crime is organised at a very high level – not only in Antigua and Barbuda, around the world. It is not the man shooting the gun, the kid that is 14 and 16, that is organising criminal enterprises. It is people who have resources. It is people who have access to power. It is people who would benefit from the crime in the state."
Senator Wehner supported DeFreitas' quote from the 2023 budget estimates with page 404 of the 2026 estimates, where the ABFS still lists laboratory and office space as a critical need, describes its current facilities as inadequate with expansion "discussions ongoing", and notes that the bill to formally establish the division is "pending in Parliament" – for at least eight years.
"If you can't even pass a piece of legislation to establish the Forensic Services Division properly, to give it the proper authority and power needed," he asked, "are we serious about fighting crime?"
"Reckless statements" on Firearms
MP Pringle also revisited a past firearm amnesty in which, he said, the Prime Minister urged the public to hand in illegal guns – except those that had been used in crimes. PM Browne told the public to dispose of firearms used to commit crimes however they can.
"Do you think a person with such a firearm is going to dispose of that firearm, if that is what they're into?" MP Pringle asked. "These reckless statements are what young people are listening to... What we need in Antigua and Barbuda is responsible leadership and leaders who can take account for their actions, whether it's positive or negative."
Asked how he would have advised a Prime Minister Pringle to word such an appeal, Senator Wehner said the question would never have arisen: "It wouldn't even cross my mind to think that the Honourable Jamale Pringle would have gone out in public to tell criminals to get rid of [those guns]." Amnesties, he added, "serve their purpose – they're a good thing" – but "people are listening to us... you never know what is going to resonate with someone and inform their actions."
Drones
The panel was also asked about last week's cabinet presentation from a US-based company proposing a National Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) drone network to track people, vehicles and vessels.
"We have no confidence in the government executing these ideas," MP Pringle said. "We would have heard years ago that they're going to invest in two maritime surveillance vessels. To date, we only got one." He asked the government to "announce what it would cost the people of Antigua and Barbuda to invest in such a technology, and then we can say whether or not it's realistic."
DeFreitas said drones are legitimate technology but pointed to the crime-lab precedent: "It is taking us 10 years to get legislation for a crime lab, something that is universally known to be necessary to fight crime. You would need legislation to set up a drone unit" – covering constitutional privacy rights, airspace, maintenance and, critically, "when we give a private entity from the United States the opportunity to look at information in Antigua, how do we protect the citizens of Antigua and Barbuda? "
"Right now you call the police, somebody is robbing you, and they tell you there's no transport to come," he said. "The drone can arrest somebody? " He noted that the police already have a drone unit and a K-9 unit, "but yet still we can't ever use those dogs to find anybody or anything."
Restore Confidence – or Restore Accountability?
Operation Restore Confidence, launched this month, has so far produced the seizure of an Astra Cub .25 pistol on August 16th, a Taurus 9mm pistol with 11 rounds during a Nut Grove stop-and-search on August 19th, and ammunition, suspected cannabis and ecstasy pills in Potters on August 20th, with multiple arrests. Police say it is not a one-off exercise.
Senator Wehner's response was that none of it should have needed a name. "I was hoping that those were things that were happening on a daily basis and wouldn't require a special operation," he said, adding that the UPP "fully supports law enforcement agencies. We don't support them with just words; we need to support them with resources."
He recalled the earlier Operation Iron Grip, which he said was launched amid a wave of chain robberies, stabbings and shootings. "Since Operation Iron Grip was announced, we've had several instances where people would have lost their lives... We even had one of our most famous investors shot on his compound. That brings into serious question the effectiveness of these operations."
"The biggest thing that the police force can do to restore confidence is not by launching another operation, but by fulfilling their most important duty: to protect the citizens of Antigua and Barbuda," Senator Wehner said.
He named the cases he said had destroyed that confidence: Kahleel Simon, shot dead by police in Bolans on his 18th birthday last August, whose family, Senator Wehner said, is still awaiting the results of a coroner's inquest while the officer involved remains on the force; Mannie James, the Bendals father of two allegedly shot dead by police and Defence Force officers in Gray's Farm in front of his children after a vehicle pursuit, and later confirmed by police to have been unarmed; and Rashawn Shabazz, the mentally ill prisoner who died on July 23rd following a police-assisted extraction from his cell at His Majesty's Prison.
"Do you think the family of Kahleel Simon thinks transparency and accountability in the police force are just buzzwords that mean nothing?" he asked. "There are dead bodies in the ground today – young men, people who are dead today – because transparency and accountability in law enforcement was not upheld."
DeFreitas stressed that "not every police officer is bad " and said his criticism was not of the operation's tactics but of its ad hoc character. "It cannot be in response to this one-time spike. It has to be a permanent system... We should not have emergency measures to fix permanent problems."
He also turned on the minister responsible. "Where is Cutie Benjamin, the minister responsible for policing? We don't hear from him at all. He lays out no policies at all relative to policing," DeFreitas said of Attorney General and Public Safety Minister Steadroy "Cutie" Benjamin. "Why would we have lost confidence in the police that we need that confidence to be restored? You only restore it if it's not there, and it was there before. Whose fault is it?"
From 'Force' to 'Service'
Asked to sum up what a UPP government would change about policing, DeFreitas said it would start with the name. "We would shift the onus from the police being a force, which suggests brutality and aggression, to a service. The police function is to protect and serve."
Every community, he said, should have an organised residents' security group with a liaison at police headquarters – something he said his own group in St. John's City South has struggled to secure – and a standing, cross-departmental crime team including Immigration, Customs, Education, Social Transformation and youth officials should exist permanently, "not just when crime spikes".
Prevention, both men argued, means sport and jobs. "Basketball courts don't play sports," DeFreitas said, pointing to underutilized courts in Falmouth and Liberta and unmaintained fields in English Harbour. "There is no organised strategy of coaches, no organised strategy of mentors, no programme for competition within the communities... When community sports thrived in Antigua and Barbuda, crime was low."
The Opposition Leader said the Prime Minister himself has acknowledged in parliament that youth unemployment and crime are linked, pointing to relaxed hiring requirements at Public Works. "They employed over 800 people, but nothing happens with regard to the reduction of crime because they are not being paid," he said, calling instead for a strong national skills-training agency.
"Crime don't ask whether you're UPP, ALP, red or blue. Crime affects all of us," MP Pringle said. "It's not red versus blue. It's all of us versus the criminal. And if there are failures within the system, we have to address the failures – and accountability must start at the top."
He closed with a line aimed squarely at the Prime Minister's confrontation with the judiciary: "We can fight criminals without fighting our institutions. We can strengthen sentencing without threatening judges."
