Faced with an alarming pattern of disappearances that have left countless families in anguish, the police have shared an initiative aimed at resolving the country’s growing crisis of missing persons.
During a press conference yesterday to address the public’s concerns about the unexplained disappearances spanning multiple communities, Acting Commissioner of Police Everton Jeffers said that a specialized task force is being put together to investigate missing persons cases.
“Earlier, I met with my senior executive and one of the things that we discussed was having a team solely responsible for missing persons. What that is going to do is that that team will sit and look at all the missing persons that we have for years gone by and they’re going to be responsible for contacting the families, following leads because you know leads comes in at different times.
“The people on the field will do the work. What they will do is to explain their findings, information they receive to the men on the field and they will go out and do the work,” he explained.
He said it is expected to be fully operational by month’s end.
Meanwhile, Assistant Commissioner of Police Clifton Cabral emphasized that there appears to be no specific pattern among the cases. “If you actually look over the years, the persons are missing from all over Antigua — all over. And so, we can’t actually group anything as we look at it at this time, and they are of all ages,” he shared.
However, the new task force will employ analytical approaches to identify potential patterns previously overlooked.
“So when that team is formed, and it is being formed as we speak, what is going to happen is that they’re going to be sitting down, and these are some of the things that they’re going to be looking at. Age group, sex, well, different type of thing,” ACP Jeffers explained.
Beyond human resources, the Commissioner highlighted technological deficiencies that are currently hampering investigative efforts.
“I think that we probably need some CCTV cameras; those would help. Again, it is so important to have these, because what we can do is trace the movement of the vehicle from one place to the next,” Jeffers noted, adding that while some surveillance infrastructure exists, they fall short of what’s needed for comprehensive coverage.
The contrast between local capabilities and international standards was made when the Acting Commissioner added: “One of the things that we need to be able to do is get what we consider to be more modernized equipment [for] the forensic unit, because sometimes when we pick these vehicles up, when they are abandoned – In America, they could take a fibre and trace a crime [but] we don’t have some of these qualities available to us.”
