Police Service.

One story concerns the manpower shortage confronting the Service, the other the decision to send negotiations on the new Police contract to arbitration.

The two stories are linked.

On the one hand, the Service is desperately short of officers on the front lines of policing, compromising their ability to prevent and detect crime. To their credit, crimes are being investigated and solved and the Island has not (yet) seen the kind of explosion in crime which an undermanned Police Service was forced to confront in the early 1990s.

On the other hand, these same officers, already stretched to the limit, are having to wait and wait for a new contract to replace the one which expired more than 18 months ago.

Surely the last thing you want to do to an overstretched and undermanned Service is to damage morale even further by failing to give its "frontline troops'' a contract which rewards their efforts and gives them incentive to remain in their jobs.

However, the fact that the negotiations have now been sent to arbitration means that the contract should be resolved shortly and presumably the report on Police pay and conditions compiled under the chairmanship of Louis Mowbray will be used at least in part as a basis for the arbitrators award.

Mr. Mowbray's report contains valuable advice for the Government, some of which may not be entirely welcome.

The report questions whether it will be possible for the Service to ever be fully Bermudianised given the competition from other careers.

Home Affairs Minister Paula Cox is right to be pushing for the recruitment of Bermudian officers and the recruiting campaign now underway should produce results, although care will have to be taken to maintain entry standards.

But much of the recruiting plan is long term and the Police now face an immediate crisis in staffing which, if there are no plans to recruit overseas now, will get worse before it gets better.

It would seem to make sense for the Government to bite the bullet and to recruit officers from abroad on short term contracts to fill the gap until the trained Bermudian officers are available in significant numbers.

A NEW VOICE EDT A new voice Another pane of the "glass ceiling'' was broken last week when Cris Dapena became the first woman to be elected president of the Bermuda Chamber of Commerce.

She has a big task ahead of her. As she says in a story in yesterday's newspaper, the Chamber faces two major challenges -- changes in financial regulation required by the British White Paper and the decline in the tourism industry.

Overall, it is important that the Chamber be able to speak with one voice on behalf of business to the community and Government.

It is inevitable that different businesses and different sectors of business will sometimes have contradictory points of view; it is the Chamber's job to determine what is in the best interests of the whole private sector. That will be Ms Dapena's greatest challenge.