PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Haitian police officers Monday demanded better protection and treatment a day after gunmen killed a Kenyan police officer who was part of a U.N.-backed mission tasked with fighting gangs in the troubled Caribbean country.
Garry Jean Baptiste, leader of one of two powerful police unions in Haiti, called on government officials to provide more equipment and backup as gangs that control 85% of the capital, Port-au-Prince, keep attacking neighborhoods to seize more territory.
“Take this insecurity seriously so more lives can be saved,” he said into a microphone as large speakers mounted on a truck amplified his message outside the offices of Haiti’s prime minister and its transitional presidential council.
About two dozen civilian protesters cheered on the union leader, with some holding signs that said, “We deserve security.”
The demands come a day after leaders of the Kenyan-led mission announced that a police officer from the East African country was shot in Haiti’s central Artibonite region just north of the capital. Several gangs control that area, including Gran Grif, accused of slaying dozens of people in a small community last year.
Jean Baptiste also denounced that police officers are not getting paid on time and asked that the government financially help the families of slain law enforcement.
Hours after the demonstration, Haitian Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé said at a news conference that the government was committed to making the country more secure “through a massive investment in equipment” for Haiti's National Police.
“ We are facing a humanitarian crisis,” he said.
More than 5,600 people were reported killed in Haiti last year, with gang violence leaving more than one million homeless in recent years, according to the U.N.
Fils-Aimé said the country was at war with the gangs and that police would keep fighting them with the ultimate goal of holding general elections for the first time in nearly a decade.
“There is a strategy, there is a will, there are means that are mobilized to put an end to the evil of insecurity,” he said.
Kenya has sent hundreds of officers to help weak Haitian law enforcement. In February, 200 more police officers from the East African country joined more than 600 other Kenyans already working alongside Haiti’s National Police as part of a multinational force boosted by soldiers and police deployed by countries including Jamaica, Guatemala and El Salvador.
