in the wake of the shock resignation of Police Commissioner Colin Coxall.

There is no reason why the officers should not have private conversations with Governor Thorold Masefield who has responsibility for the Police Service under Bermuda's Constitution.

However it is an indication of how much more smoothly Bermuda might have been policed if Colin Coxall's contribution had been appreciated fully and if there had been a decision to extend his term of service in Bermuda. We see the whole highly complicated departure of the Commissioner as unnecessary and disruptive of the wishes of Bermudians to be well policed.

In a very real sense the four officers who have twice visited Governors have had their chance to show that they could police Bermuda well. They were all in senior positions during what was generally seen as a decline in the effectiveness of the Police Service. They have all had their contributions and their abilities examined twice by a highly respected and impartial outsider, Lionel Grundy, and he would have recommended their promotions if he had believed them capable of fulfilling the jobs of Commissioner or Deputy Commissioner. He did not do so.

We believe Bermudians want to be well policed. We do not believe there is any sinister intent to stop Bermudians attaining the highest level of their service. Any number of organisations in Bermuda in recent years have found themselves with senior Bermudian employees who were not up to being promoted to the top or who had been promoted beyond their abilities. Colin Coxall was invited to Bermuda to modernise the Police Service. Anyone who thought about that before he even arrived knew that was not good news for some serving officers.

That is not to say that these four men have not made contributions to the Police Service during long years of service. But, with one exception, they have not had senior experience outside Bermuda and it is now thought, quite correctly, that in the future the top jobs should go to people who have broadened their experience outside Bermuda into a total concept of policing.

Senior Police service is now a highly sophisticated profession and it is thought that people should not simply be promoted through the ranks in Bermuda until they reach the top.

In fact, we understand that Mr. Grundy suggested that there would be no Bermudian officer completely trained for ten years. He also said that it would be a mistake to rush forward a Bermudian for political purposes who was not fully trained and thus set up to fail. Government has to remember that.

Why did we not keep Colin Coxall? We knew his strengths and we knew him as a good policeman. Now we are in a position of having again disrupted the Police Service to no real point and have to go overseas to look for another non-Bermudian. A good person may be hard to find because of the way Colin Coxall has been treated. That will lead to another political row and could well result in getting someone who is not up to Colin Coxall's high standards.

That makes no sense.