The Royal Grenada Police Force (RGPF) wants to see greater involvement by members of the public in helping them to smash a gambling ring involving students from several secondary schools in the city.
According to a police insider those mainly involved in the gambling are students from the Grenada Boys Secondary School (GBSS), TA Marryshow Community College (TAMCC), and the JW Fletcher Catholic Secondary School.
He said that a lot of gambling is taking place among school children around the Tanteen Lawn Tennis court and the police need the help of the public in rooting it out.
“That is a serious thing now,” he told THE NEW TODAY.
The source pointed out that police officers are forced to go to the lawn tennis court almost every “morning and evening” to run the school children who are often engaged in gambling activities.
He said the students often evade the lawmen by shifting the time when they gather to gamble “so we can’t macco them all the time.”
“We understand now that the time is after 4. By the time we reach dey, they does just break up,” he added.
The police insider indicated that persons who use the facility to play Tennis often complain of seeing these young students engaged in gambling in their uniforms.
“Once people gambling it has drugs selling around dey – any way gambling takes place, there are drugs selling dey too,” he remarked.
The source stressed that one major media outlet on the island had put out a report on the gambling among the students around the Tanteen Tennis court “and it scared a few of them to stay away for a while”.
In addition he said that due to the gambling activities among the students, police are forced to deal with a lot of fights among them.
“When some lose their money they can’t face it and become very violent,” he added.
The Police insider called for more of the local media houses on the island to focus on the gambling by the students in order to force parents to pay closer attention to the activities of their children.
“We are looking for some help from the media in that area,” he remarked.
According to the source, a major problem faced by RGPF is the decision of a previous government to make changes to the law in which Gambling is no longer an offense.
“What is happening right now is that we can only charge for unlawful assembly and to prove unlawful assembly the evidence has to be greater and deeper because you have to look at the purpose of that place.
“That is why nobody is gambling in a building –they’re gambling in the open because they will say they’re in the public space. If it’s in a building then we could grab them and say that all you were assembling for an illegal activity towards gambling to which this facility is not a licensed facility to gamble.
“So the bright ones get to know that so everybody gambling outside. Can you pick up a man in the open space and charge him for loitering because loitering is when spoken to move, you did refuse to do so by a public officer – it could be a JP, a police. So if you tell a man to move, he just walk out.”
The police insider does not see the Congress government of Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell reversing the law on gambling due to possible consequences for it among the youth vote in general election but the hope of the lawmen is that parents will control “their young ones.”