The number of police officers in Bermuda has reached the lowest level in 30 years, the Minister of National Security said on Friday.

Michael Weeks, who gave a breakdown of his ministry’s budget in the House of Assembly, said that the Bermuda Police Service lost 19 police officers, or 4 per cent of their force, during the 2023-24 period.

He said that the remaining 473 employees represent a level that has not been seen since the 1990s.

Mr Weeks said: “It’s something that nobody wants to admit, but I think that we have to face the fact that we have to fill these posts

“If we cannot in the immediate term fill them with Bermudian men and women, we’ll have to come to the realisation that we may have to go overseas until we can get our recruits up to scratch in our new cadet programme.”

Last year, the BPS received more than 100 applications, but only nine made it into the training course after the majority of applicants failed the health and fitness or psychological tests.

Police were given the go-ahead to open recruitment for non-Bermudians on the island, and this was expected to bring in about 15 more recruits.

Mr Weeks said that the BPS were not able to recruit many new officers, and had 52 new recruits across emergency services after trying to recruit 78.

The minister said: “The struggle is real.”

He added: “The problem is not necessarily that the pool is shrinking, because the pool has remained the same.

The quality of the candidates was the problem, the minister said.

Mr Weeks said his ministry would hold a cadet-training course to recruit more officers.

He added that it was hoped 101 new officers could be recruited this year.

Mr Weeks said that the problem was also “nothing new”, with the BPS and other uniformed services having struggled to recruit new members for years.

He said that the Department of Corrections had sought to hire 30 new officers last year, only to finalise nine.

The minister said that the cadet-training programme should help to resolve these issues.

He added that the national security ministry was willing to look overseas to fill the police ranks.

Mr Weeks said: “Right now, it’s a challenge, and some of our uniform services, especially our police, can’t wait for us to get people trained up, so they may have to go overseas faster than the other uniform services in order to get their numbers up to be able to address the issues and safety of our country.”

He added: “What we can’t do is bring down the requirements just to have Bermudians in these posts.”

The Ministry of National Security has an operational budget of $137,759,000 for the next 12 months, with an additional $8,160,375 dedicated to capital funding.

Of this amount, the BPS were given more than $64 million, with an additional $1.6 million for capital projects.

Mr Weeks announced on February 21 that part of this $64 million would be used to hire 30 new police officers.

He added that it would also be used to refurbish the police headquarters in Devonshire and improve its vehicle fleet and IT infrastructure.