By *Guevara Leacock
On A View from the Outside this week, we turn our attention to the new leadership of the Royal St. Vincent and the Grenadines Police Force (RSVGPF), with the view being that the complaint being made about the promotion of Brenton Smith cannot be made honestly by the political party that took a station sergeant and made him commissioner of police within three years. In fact, it is pure hypocrisy.
Here is what happened this week. From Monday, Aug. 17, the RSVGPF has a new team at the top. Trevor Bailey, who most of us know as Buju, is the acting commissioner of police. Junior Simmons is the acting deputy commissioner. Brenton Smith is an acting assistant commissioner. This week he was handed responsibility for crime fighting, which in a year like this one, where three shootings are taking place in Kingstown in one weekend, is the hardest job in the country.
By Wednesday, the Leader of the Opposition was on his radio programme calling Mr. Smith a politician in a police uniform. He said he intends to write to CARICOM and to the Commonwealth about what he called the dangerous politicisation of the police force. He said international policing organisations such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) would have a difficult time working with police politicians. He said Mr. Smith was a station sergeant five years ago, went home over the vaccine, came back after the election and skipped assistant superintendent to land at assistant commissioner.
Do you remember who else made that climb, and who put them there?
In September 2005, Keith Miller was made commissioner of police. In 2002, he was a station sergeant. In 2004, he was an inspector of police. Early in 2005, he was made an assistant superintendent of police. By Sept. 30 that same year, he had on the commissioner’s uniform. He never served a day as a superintendent of police. He never served a day as an assistant commissioner of police. He never served a day as a deputy commissioner of police. He went from station sergeant to the top of the RSVG in about three years. The prime minister of the day announced it in a broadcast to the nation and then went to Sharpes Playing Field and gave the reasons all over again at a ULP rally. Not at a press conference. At a party political rally.
Then take Michael Charles. Mr. Charles joined the police force in 1981 and gave St. Vincent and the Grenadines a long career. But from 2001 to 2005, his posting was head of security for the prime minister. He was promoted to station sergeant in 2005, went on to inspector, to assistant superintendent, to assistant commissioner, and in 2013 he became commissioner of police. A man whose job for four years was standing beside the prime minister rose to lead the police force. Nobody in the ULP wrote to the Commonwealth about that one.
In 2020, two days before the general election, the Police Service Commission signed off on the promotion of 47 police officers to the ranks of assistant commissioner, superintendent, assistant superintendent and inspector. Two days before Vincentians went to vote. Do you think that those promoted then might have been politicians in uniform? We may never know.
When the questions came, the leadership of the ULP went on television and explained that promotion above the rank of sergeant runs through the permanent secretary and the Police Service Commission and that the commissioner and the deputy are the prime minister’s call under the Constitution. He also stated that the police force uses what he himself called accelerated promotion. Accelerated promotion! His words, not ours.
So the objection on the table this week is not really an objection to accelerated promotion. Accelerated promotion is a ULP invention in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, defended in public by the man who used it. The objection now is to somebody else using it. Hypocrisy.
The Leader of the Opposition said on Wednesday that Brenton Smith “went home over the vaccine”. Well, he did not go home of his own volition; he was dismissed – fired from his job. He was not dismissed for misconduct. He was not dismissed for corruption, or for brutality, or for anything he did to a member of the public. He was dismissed in 2021 because he would not take a vaccine that the ULP government of the day made compulsory for frontline workers, and it cost him four years of service.
Now count what four years is worth inside the RSVGPF. Four years is longer than the whole distance Keith Miller travelled from station sergeant to commissioner of police. Think about what that means for Mr. Smith. For four years, he could not act in a higher rank, could not be recommended and could not be considered for a single promotion, for the simple reason that he was not in the police force to be considered.
Nobody can say what he would have achieved in those years. But on the ULP’s own precedent, on the ULP’s own arithmetic, a station sergeant with an unblemished record who was in the force in 2021 could have been commissioner of police by now. The party that took those four years away from Brenton Smith is the same party now telling Vincentians that he has risen too far and too fast.
To be fair to the ULP, the concern about Mr. Smith is not manufactured. It is true that he was general secretary of the New Democratic Party while he was out of the police force. That is not a small detail and no one should pretend it is. A police officer’s authority rests on all Vincentians believing he will treat them the same whether they voted yellow or red, and a man who held office in a governing party carries a weight the rest of the high command does not carry.
It is also true that he has 28 years of service, that he holds a master’s degree in police leadership and management, and that he wrote 182 of the police force’s own policies. So as an experienced career police officer he has every right to rise to the top ranks of the police force. Both of those things can be true at the same time.
The real problem is not this person or that person. It is that in St. Vincent and the Grenadines we have never carved out distance between the police force and the party in office. Every government we have elected has treated the police high command as something to be arranged, and every opposition has objected loudly until the day it becomes the government.
Adrian Odle wrote this week about officers who have come to him with 10, 15 and 25 years of clean service who still cannot get an answer as to why they keep being passed over. Do the arithmetic. An officer sitting at a junior rank today after 20 years of service was passed over for promotion in 2008, and in 2012, and in 2016, and in 2020, and in 2024. Every one of those years falls inside the 24 years the ULP was in office.
The officer with 15 years was overlooked under the ULP. The officer with 10 years was overlooked under the ULP. There were disgruntled officers in the police force for a very long time, and none of us should pretend the frustration started after November 2025. The new government has been in office for nine months. It did not create the promotions queue which exists in the police force. It inherited it, and it inherited it from an administration that somehow found the time to promote forty-seven officers two days before a general election.
That does not let this government off. The promotions queue is theirs to clear now, and the men and women standing in it are the same officers we are asking to walk into a gunfight in Kingstown on a Saturday night. Last year 113 recruits passed out of training and it was barely enough to replace the ones who left the police force. The point about low morale in the police force is accepted but it is not a new problem. A demoralised officer still turns up for work, but they stop doing the extra thing that was never in their job description, and in a year of plenty shootings that may be costing lives.
We on A View from the Outside say two things to this government:
First, find every officer who has sat at the same rank for more than ten years, look at each file properly, and either promote them or give them written reasons explaining plainly what they need to do to be promoted the next time round.
Second, settle the political question by law rather than by assurance. Set a fixed period during which a person who has held office in a political party cannot hold a command rank in the police force. Make it law so that it binds this government and the next one equally. If the NDP legislates that now, at cost to itself, the argument about Mr. Smith ends and this country never has to have it again.
We on A View from the Outside say that a police force is not made honest by the party in office being honest. It is made honest by rules that survive a change of government.
So in the coming days, when somebody tells you that the police force has only now been politicised, ask them one simple question. Ask them how in 2005 a station sergeant became commissioner of police within three years and why nobody wrote to CARICOM or the Commonwealth then. The record is public. It is not hidden away anywhere. Go and look at it for yourself, and then make up your own mind rather than letting either political party make it up for you.
*Guevara Leacock is a barrister at law of Lincoln’s Inn in England and an attorney at law in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. He has a keen interest in history and politics and is a social commentator.
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