Commissioner of Police Stephen Corbishley – The Bermuda Police Service can confirm that officers executed several search warrants in the Curving Avenue, Pembroke area Wednesday, December 19th and Thursday, December 20th.

In total 3 firearms and a large quantity of drugs was recovered.

This represents a significant firearms recovery with three firearms and just under $1 million dollars’ worth of drugs being taken off Bermuda’s streets.

I would like to thank all the officers who were involved in this operation. Their hard work, attention to detail and dedication yielded significant results and ultimately our local community is the beneficiary.

I would also like to thank members of our community who heeded our call to be bold and communicate any information to us, no matter how insignificant it appeared to be.

This however, is not a time for the Bermuda Police Service to be complacent – but it does highlight the work that still has to be done to make our communities safer.

We are an intelligence led organisation and the fruits of activity over the last couple of days is testament to that fact.

The communities where these firearms were found are good communities. They are communities with different people – seniors, young people, families, law abiding.

Where we worked in the last couple of days is not representative of those communities.

What it is representative of, is a small number of criminal who are intent on using violence with each other, and the highest level of violence involving firearms.

So by taking the firearms away from them, and taking drugs away from them that they will put on our streets, it impacts their ability to cause harm, distress and indeed loss of life to loved ones.

So that’s the best thing that we’ve done. But we will continue working in those communities, we will continue to listen to them, we will continue to support them so we continue to target those criminals who have no regard for law and order and no regard for the way in which those communities want to live.

It is Christmas and whilst the events of the past couple of days are notable, I would like to reiterate that Bermuda is a safe place – there are few firearms in Bermuda, there are few people that use them and our activities have addressed some of that matter over the past 48 hours.

I want people to feel confident in the Bermuda Police Service – confident that they can contact us, confident that we will keep it confidential and confident that we will do something about it.

This is part of our continuing operation to tackle the effects of gang violence, the use of firearms in our community and to take drugs off our streets.

So as we move into 2019 more effort, greater intelligence will be used and more work will be done to make Bermuda safer.