Police Commissioner Michael DeSilva has warned that the $7.5 million slash in his department’s funding may mean less of a response to non-emergency situations.However, he pledged to keep the same focus on the fight against guns and gangs.The Bermuda Police Service got $58.2 million funding for the forthcoming fiscal year, an 11 percent drop from the $65.7 million allocated for the current one.This year’s budget is more than $12.3 million less than the $70.5 million allocated to the force during 2009/10, which was the year gun and gang crime suffered a dramatic escalation.Reacting to news of the budget cut announced on Friday, a spokesman for Mr DeSilva said yesterday: “The Commissioner and his senior commanders are still working on the details of where the cost reductions will be implemented in order to reach the $58 million mark set by the Budget.“The Commissioner will work closely with the Minister of National Security to make sensible funding decisions without jeopardising operations.“Clearly, we may have to scale back our response to non-emergencies. But our commitment to the Island is that resources will remain tightly focused on operational priorities: guns, gangs, drugs and violence and there will be no reductions made in these areas.”His words echoed those of the Minister, David Burch, who said on Friday: “I wish to assure the people of Bermuda that the successes achieved in public safety and restoring safer communities will not be sacrificed in the name of funding challenges.“The Bermuda Police Service will continue to provide the coverage and targeted enforcement that has yielded the impressive results of arrests and charges through 2010. This will require some deployment management on the part of the Commissioner and he and I will continue to discuss how to meet the needs of the public in a way that does not ‘burn out’ the hard-working men and women of the BPS.”However, the reassurances were called into question by the Bermuda Democratic Alliance’s national security spokesman Mark Pettingill, who said it was “absurd” to expect the police to do more with less.