Last October, acting Police Commissioner Jacqueline Vanterpool felt close to realising her career-long dream of being confirmed as the first female police commissioner in Virgin Islands history.
The Virgin Gorda native, who has served on the police force for more than three decades, had applied for the top job and received an invitation to interview for the position.
Then Governor Daniel Pruce suspended the hiring process.
Sitting behind her desk on the second floor of police headquarters in Road Town, the acting commissioner chose her words carefully.
“I fit the entire criteria that the ad asked for, and I applied,” she told the Beacon during a March 26 interview in her office. “And I was shortlisted to be one of the applicants to go through an interview. I got an interview date for October 22nd last year.”
That interview, however, never came.
“I then got a call from the governor saying that he’s cancelling the entire process,” Ms. Vanterpool recalled. “And he’s going to restart it at some point, but he wants to let me know that I did not fail the process, but when it’s advertised I have to reapply.”
On Oct. 31, Mr. Pruce publicly announced the postponement of the hiring process while the job criteria were revised to better accord with recommendations from the law-enforcement review being carried out by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services.
And last month, the position was readvertised following the April 8 release of the review’s scathing second volume.
But after her previous experience with the hiring process, Ms. Vanterpool told the Beacon in March that she wasn’t planning to reapply.
“It is clear as crystal that they don’t want me as a commissioner sitting in the seat,” Ms. Vanterpool said. “I’ve seen it over and over. It’s clear as crystal they don’t want me. It’s a [United Kingdom] national they want back in the seat as commissioner.”
Though Ms. Vanterpool took a less forceful stance in an interview last week with JTV, leaving the door open to re-applying after all, she told the Beacon in March that other shortlisted applicants shared in her disappointment at the postponement of the hiring process.
“I later found out who they were,” she said. “They too expressed disgust, dissatisfaction of it being cancelled.”
Past struggle
Last year’s hiring process wasn’t the first time Ms. Vanterpool has faced challenges in her lengthy law-enforcement career, she told the Beacon.
Ever since her decision to join the force, she said, her rise through the ranks has often been met with struggles.
When she was growing up on Virgin Gorda, the sight of her brother’s neatly pressed Royal Virgin Islands Police Force uniform shone with opportunity each time he arrived home from his week’s shift on Tortola.
“It was a joy for me to see my brother putting on his uniform and going to work,” she said. “And I used to keep telling myself that one day I am going to be like my brother because that’s what I want to do.”
But it wasn’t until she was almost too old to qualify for the RVIPF that Ms. Vanterpool was finally given the chance to wear the badge.
Denied
When Ms. Vanterpool was 18, she attempted to join the RVIPF, but then-commissioner John “Barry” Rutherford denied her application at the last minute at the request of her mother, she said.
“My mom travelled from Virgin Gorda to Tortola and met with the commissioner,” Ms. Vanterpool said. “In my presence, [my mother said] she does not want me to be a police. Mr. Rutherford looked at me and said he have to honour my mom’s request.”
Four years later, she tried again.
“At the age of 22, I reapplied, went through the same thing: completed everything, successful — again, stopped by another UK commissioner [who] honoured my mom’s request.”
Looking back, Ms. Vanterpool told the Beacon that she still remembers her mother fondly despite the attempts to undermine her enlistment.
“I don’t know how she got it done, but she did it: We never one day went hungry or dirty, and that is why I commend her highly,” she said. “May her soul rest in peace.”
First Virgin Islander
It wasn’t until Vernon Malone — the first Virgin Islander police commissioner — honoured Ms. Vanterpool’s wishes to become a police officer that she was accepted into the RVIPF at age 28, she said.
At boot camp in Barbados, she set her next goal while on the cusp of earning her badge.
“All three instructors who gave me a very hard time in training school — all three of them wrote a glorious report on me,” Ms. Vanterpool said. “And what stood out in those reports from all three of them: ‘Don’t change the person who you are; stay who you are — you’re gonna make great strides in your force.’ All three of them wrote that. Do you know what I told them? I wanted to become the first female commissioner of police. This was July of ’91.”
‘Not perfect’
Since then, Ms. Vanterpool said, she has worked under six commissioners, including the only two Virgin Islanders to have held the position: Mr. Malone, who served for about a decade after his appointment in 1992, and Reynell Frazer, who served from 2005 to 2013.
“They were not perfect; they were imperfect,” she said of the six. “They made errors, they made decisions that affected the organisation, but they were given the respect as six imperfect men.”
Now that she’s acting as commissioner, however, Ms. Vanterpool said she sometimes feels that she doesn’t receive the same respect as her male predecessors.
“I’m now sitting in the seat as an acting commissioner, as a female — imperfect as well, because I’m not perfect: I make decisions that not everyone is pleased with,” she said. “And all I’ve been asking is, ‘Why can’t I get just a little bit of the respect that was given to the six imperfect men who were in here? Why? Is it because I’m a woman? Is it because I’m a local? What is it?’ I don’t understand it.”
UK training
As Ms. Vanterpool climbed through the ranks of the force, she frequently encountered and overcame sexism, she said. “I was quiet, and I’ll tell you why,” she said. “The male boys caused me to become withdrawn, because whatever I put forward, they shut down.”
This male-centred atmosphere, she said, affected her confidence.
“I never used to talk: People don’t believe me, but that’s how I was,” Ms. Vanterpool said. “It’s a male, egotistical behaviour is what shut me down for years.”
Eventually, however, then-commissioner Michael Matthews, who held the post from 2016 to 2021, took her under his wing and helped her gain a leader’s confidence, she said.
“One morning, I exit the meeting and saw Michael Matthews looking at me in disgust,” Ms. Vanterpool recalled. “I [had] put forward a recommendation and [other officers] shut it down, so I pulled back.”
After seeing her retreat, she said, Mr. Matthews took her into his office to intervene.
“Matthews pulled me from that meeting and bring me to his office,” Ms. Vanterpool said. “He said, ‘Make today the last day you come in any meeting I’m chairing and you get shut down and you shut your mouth.’”
Over the next five years, Ms. Vanterpool said, Mr. Matthews became a valued mentor, eventually deciding she was ready for strategic command training in England.
“When I became superintendent, he said, ‘I’m sending you now to a force in the UK for secondment.’ He sent me to Sussex police for six weeks.”
It was because of Mr. Matthews that she is where she is today, Ms. Vanterpool said.
“I can never forget Michael Matthews,” she said. “I can never forget him.”
Seat time
Ms. Vanterpool has been acting as police commissioner since late October, when Mark Collins retired from the position. This isn’t the first time she has acted in the role, however.
“I sat in the position as acting commissioner under Mark Collins’ watch many times — many times as acting commissioner — and did an excellent job, and [I’m] still doing an excellent job,” she said. “He left the organisation; he recommended me to be acting commissioner, and I was sitting in his seat from the day he left until now — and still doing an excellent job, still providing results.”
Besides managing the force’s day-to-day operations, Ms. Vanterpool has shouldered a seismic, two-part law-enforcement review and started instituting changes based on the review’s recommendations, she said.
Working with the House of Assembly, Ms. Vanterpool and her team have also consulted on the most recent police and cybercrime bills, she added.
During this time, she noted, multiple senior positions in the RVIPF have been vacant, leaving her with a “skeleton” command team.
“But I’m happy to report that despite not having that proper team in place, we were able to accomplish a lot,” she said.
Asked for comment on Ms. Vanterpool’s claims about the commissioner hiring process, the Governor’s Office referred the Beacon to Mr. Pruce’s Oct. 31 statement, which thanked applicants and noted that they were welcome to re-apply by “showing they meet the requirements of the new job description.”
On April 8, the day the second volume of the law-enforcement review was released to the public, Mr. Pruce announced that the hiring process for the new commissioner would resume “very soon.”
On April 17, he followed through, announcing that the hiring process had relaunched.
“Last autumn, I suspended the recruitment process for the next commissioner of police. I did so in anticipation of the publication of the second volume of the HMICFRS Law Enforcement Review, to more accurately define the person specification needed for this critical role,” Mr. Pruce said. “This has now taken place, and a new recruitment campaign is now live.”
The governor went on to describe the qualities needed in the VI’s next police commissioner.
“The person specification identifies the high level of policing expertise and experience the RVIPF needs,” he said. “It also describes the leadership qualities required to lead the RVIPF at this critical juncture in its history. We need a police commissioner who can deliver transformational change in a complex organisation at a time when the challenges it faces are rapidly evolving.”
