Amid the commendations and awards in Police Commissioner Michael DeSilva’s office is one prize he holds in especially high regard — a drawing by a five-year-old girl of a smiling officer.

The colourful picture was given to him three years ago by a pupil from West Pembroke Primary, Amayah Burt, and it sums up the vision of Bermuda Police Service — officers working in the community, with the community, for the community.

“She’s written ‘good boys, good girls, less crime, happy police’,” said a smiling Mr DeSilva, who highlighted the picture as an example of the bridges built between his staff and young people, and the youth interaction he hopes to enjoy during this year’s annual Police Week celebrations, which begin next month.

This year’s event is particularly significant as it will also help to mark the Service’s 135th anniversary.

“We launched Police Week in 2007, this is the eighth year,” Mr DeSilva said.

“Community has always been a central theme, all things community, particularly with the youth.

“For the last few years the themes really were different variations on police and youth. It’s always about that, although in this milestone year we wanted to do a few different things, too.”

A priority this year, the Commissioner emphasises, is to pay tribute to staff past and present — not just officers, but also Reserve constables and the Service’s support staff.

“It’s a recognition of 135 years of history, so the theme should be about our history — the work done before all of us were here by former officers, former Reserves, former support staff,” Mr DeSilva said. “We want to include our former colleagues as much as possible. When you think ‘police’ you automatically think of officers but there are other parts of this organisation — our Reserves are members of our community who volunteer their time.

“We ideally want to get as many former staff as we have available to pitch up at Hamilton Police Station on October 8 for the Parade of Staff — a visual representation of the past and the present. We’ll capture that and immortalise it with a photograph at City Hall.” Mr DeSilva encourages the public to attend the parade because “it would surprise me if there was any family in Bermuda who doesn’t have a connection to the police”.

He said he had just welcomed 25 new officers from the 74th Recruitment Foundation Course and that if you averaged at least 10 from every one of those courses, that was 740 — although the Commissioner believes the number is more than 1,000.

That’s officers alone, not taking into account all the Service’s other staff past and present — a huge reach Island-wide.

“A huge portion of that number is in the community somewhere,” he said. “There’s a rich history with Bermuda and we want to recognise that contribution.”

Mr DeSilva joined the Service as a cadet in 1985 and rose through the ranks to take on the responsibility as Commissioner in late 2009.

Looking back on his own history ahead of the anniversary, he said his proudest moments in nearly three decades of working to make Bermuda safer included helping the Service to become more engaged with the community — a move he believes contributed to reducing gang crime.

Within 24 hours of Mr DeSilva being offered the Commissioner’s job, he said three people were shot and two died.

“One was the night before, one the day of, one the night after,” he said. “Gang and violent crime rocked us when I was appointed. By 2010 it was starting to peak. That was hard to police, operationally hard to get as many police officers on the ground and firearms officers on patrol.

“Public confidence was pretty low when I took over. We fought back into the communities to gain confidence, trust and cooperation. It wasn’t a well-oiled machine.

“I’d love to say the police came along and bottomed out gang crime.

“We stepped up enforcement but we needed the community to come on board. We came together to reduce the problem. But it’s still important and we can’t afford to allow things to relapse.

“We’ve suppressed gang activity through a number of factors but we haven’t solved it. We need to shift resources into more prevention education, it’s an investment in the future.”

Mr DeSilva said this week’s shooting highlighted that gang activity had not been erased.

“There has been a significant reduction in tension between gangs, it’s not the powder keg it was,” he said. “What this shooting indicates is that there is still tension.”

Investigations are under way into the shooting of the 17-year-old boy in Southampton on Monday night, the Commissioner said.

“As long as tensions remain, there’s work to be done diverting gang members from violence, future-proofing our young people so they don’t get that exposure,” he added.

Police have partnered with a number of agencies, such as Family Centre, to help prevent youngsters being caught up in gang activity through schemes such as the Youth Policing Initiative.

“When we talk about gang members there seems to be this preconceived demonisation, that they are consciously doing what they are doing,” Mr DeSilva said.

“We see these kids are victims of their circumstances. They don’t wake up one morning and say, ‘I’ll be a gang member, I’m going to get a gun’. They suffer from years of dysfunction. They’re not given options, they don’t seek it out. We want to get to the front of that process and get a different result.”

Another source of pride for Mr DeSilva is that when he took over, public confidence and satisfaction in the Service was about 40 percent but is now “in the high sixties and peaked at 68 percent”.

“The number I look at is at the bottom of the scale, public dissatisfaction — it’s down to seven percent,” he said.

He is also pleased to see crime rates are now at their lowest level since 2000 — 750 crimes during the second quarter of this year.

“The reduction in crime generally has been rewarding, without a doubt,” Mr DeSilva said. “But there is a reduction in crime worldwide, a downward trend in the US, UK, Canada and Bermuda.

“We recorded the lowest quarter of crime in June, that was very rewarding. We’ve really tried to change the preconception that police are unhelpful, unresponsive to community needs, unapproachable, that we don’t have sympathy. We’re here for the community, we will police in the way that you want.

“I’m really pleased with the change in attitude. I get many calls telling me my officers were helpful and went the extra mile.

“But what depresses me is we still get a handful of complaints that officers were rude, didn’t help. That’s the next evolution for us — customer service.

“It’s the life or death of a company — if you don’t have customer service you’re out of business. You don’t buy from the police service but that’s no reason for us not to have it.

“It’s an education thing, raising staff awareness. But sometimes we work with a difficult crowd of people, we see people at their worst and our job is dangerous.”

Mr DeSilva was keen to pay tribute to his dedicated and hard-working team and said he hoped the Service would be recruiting again in the near future.

He also hoped to see as many members of the community at the various Police Week celebrations, from October 4-11.

Any former police officers, Reserves and support staff are encouraged to take part in the Parade of Staff on October 8, beginning at 11am. For more information about this or any of the Police Week events, visit www.bps.bm