00:00President of the Estate Police Association, Derek Richardson, is sounding the alarm on the nation's schools.
00:07He warns that while some schools have police on site, many remain unprotected, leaving students and staff at serious risk.
00:15Richardson says this gap makes it critical to deploy more trained officers and strengthen security systems immediately.
00:23The situation in the schools is abysmal. The security of the persons who come into the school, who use the school, the security of ourselves, the infrastructure is abysmal, right?
00:38What you have is a policy decision about the industry that will have two estate contractors, two officers, in fact, at the schools.
00:47These schools, some of them, 800 or 1,000 plus, and you'll have two persons that are supposed to secure the compound, and that is quite inadequate.
01:00He tells the Morning Edition that multiple schools have experienced serious security breaches.
01:06We would have had incidences in Palo Seco recently, where they went in and the custody officer took an iPad and a vehicle, right?
01:18There was a shooting incident in Waterloo. There was in Woodland, where they moved down the door, took the officer's property and left, right?
01:29And we know of, there's a lot, a lot, a lot of incidents, right, where people come into the schools, take things. Some of them go on reporting.
01:38He warns that there is an urgent need for proper training for estate police officers stationed at educational institutions.
01:48Richardson is pleading for more to be done to repair and strengthen the physical boundaries of these schools.
01:54We are advocating for, just for, you to fix the physical infrastructure.
02:00Now, by that, we mean the fencing, the lighting, the communication, the amount of staff that is assigned to the schools,
02:07knowing that the threat level has been raised.
02:10We can't have 1962 infrastructure.
02:15We can't have a decision to take, to have only two persons to secure an entire compound.
02:20Nicole M. Romany, TV6 News.
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