Aggressive C&I Tactics at Nanny Cay

While the article puts a government spin on this exercise, there really was no reason to come armed, with dogs, at 06:00 in the morning! This is not BVI Love.

https://bvinews.com/jtf-ensuring-boaters-complying-with-customs-immigration-laws/

Nanny Cay has told me in the past that the officers do a lot of compliance checks for boat importation certificates, but this seems to be the first time that they checked the boats at the docks as well! One more nail in the coffin of BVI tourism. Although I was on St. Martin last week (the place where the license plate reads "the friendly island") and had some motorcycle hooligans attempt to extort money from drivers with an improvised roadblock that was set before the actual roadblock on the French side set up by people with actual grievances - that wasn't much of an advertisement for tourism, either.

The comments are interesting!

@GeorgeC1 - the comments are usually more interesting and informative than the articles in BVI News

It is good they brought machine guns with them. Most sailboats have incredibly dangerous winch handles on board so without proper armament they could have been hurt!

And they could dump burning BBQ coals on potential boarders as well...

Ah, I did not think about burning coals! I guess that explains the 6am raid timing! Not to many people barbecuing at 6am. Smart tactical move!

Are any of those people even trained to shoot a machine gun?

@tradewinds - I used to train such officers in my previous life and doubt that they have any training, I've seen outrageously bad gun handling in the BVI before which would have resulted in officer suspension in other jurisdictions. There certainly isn't a training facility in the BVI. But I'm also not sure that they had full-automatic rifles, they might have been armed with semi-automatics as both types are identical except for the sear mechanism. Nonetheless it does seem overly heavy-handed as they already had overwhelming numbers and didn't need additional overwhelming firepower - unless they expected to encounter more than sleepy and hungover sailors.

Hung over sailors can be mean! I know this from experience. Never try and wake a boat load of them up to sail to St Croix at 7 AM after you closed the WillyT. Mean, very mean!

There doesn't seem to be much middle ground when it comes to weapons here. It seems the officers are either unarmed or part of the ARV (armed response vehicle) team. I've been part of a routine traffic stop that included 2 officers with the semi or automatic rifles on each side of the vehicle and also seen them carry the same weapons into Omar's to pickup takeout food from the bar.