Turks and Caicos engulfed by gang warfare, says Foreign Office report
With sweeping beaches and turquoise waters, the Turks and Caicos Islands, a British territory in the Caribbean, are best known as one of the most beautiful tourist destinations in the world.
But an internal Foreign Office investigation seen by the Guardian lays bare the extent to which the islands were engulfed by extreme violence last year amid a turf war for control of drug trafficking routes.
Local police, it concluded, had been “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.
Those findings were echoed by a separate report by academics from Sheffield Hallam University, who reported widespread public mistrust towards state institutions, including what was delicately described as a “policecommunity legitimacy gap”.
Sources told the Guardian several warnings about police incompetence and possible corruption had been communicated to the office of the governor, a Whitehall-appointed representative of the British crown with constitutional responsibility for the territory, in recent years.
The governor, Dileeni Daniel-Selvaratnam, who was appointed to the position in June, declined to comment on the Foreign Office review, but said in a statement that she was “committed to tackling allegations of corruption or poor practice”.
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,” it concluded. “The levels of murder, violent crime and use of firearms significantly exceed anything experienced by the UK, or any other British overseas territory.”
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. The report observed, however, 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 recognised across TCI’s public service system by interview participants [and] survey respondents,” it said. So endemic was the problem that islanders believed corruption was “the second most important crime concern to address on the islands after murder”.
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 rumours 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.”
‘Serious threats from transnational crime’
The Foreign Office report was more equivocal, withholding direct criticism and offering muted praise for recent improvements. But it also listed several failures and deficiencies, suggesting these may have contributed to the island’s inability to resist the subsequent explosion in extreme violence.
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.
It also observed a reluctance to use a British government crime-recording system, OTRCIS, which shares data with other British territories in the Caribbean. About a quarter of reports were not entered into the system, with the remainder instead being recorded only in a locally held spreadsheet.
The review recommended that the force record all crime data in OTRCIS. The Foreign Office did not respond to a question about whether the TCI police were yet doing so.
Daniel-Selvaratnam said in a statement that 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.”