Barbados Today

The Royal Barbados Police Force’s (RBPF) crime chief has retired from the Force, 23 months after his elevation to the post of Acting Assistant Commissioner of Police responsible for Crime Management.

Lybron Sobers, whose substantive position was Senior Superintendent of Police, was appointed to act in the position after his close friend and predecessor Livingston Eversley died suddenly in April 2016.

According to the Official Gazette dated December 14, 2017, Sobers retired from the RBPF effective January 1, 2018.

Sobers, who had been in the Force for 46 years and seven months, told Barbados TODAY this afternoon his greatest achievement was that all the officers he supervised had received promotion at some point.

He said he enjoyed every moment as a law enforcer, and recalled his arrest, which took place even before he was a policeman.

“I arrested a man the police were looking for when I was a 17-year-old civilian working with the Immigration Department. That was when the police were in charge of immigration,” the retired senior police officer said, recalling that he had applied to join the Force at age 17, but was refused because he was too young, but was accepted the following year.

The former crime chief also recalled that he and Eversley solved a string of murders with a single arrest.

“Between 2003 and 2004 myself and Eversley charged a man . . . for four murders at one time. One of them was a seven-year-old death, a guy from Coverley Christ Church. He was recorded as a sudden death, but when we interviewed the guy he told us how he had murdered him,” Sobers told Barbados TODAY as he relaxed at home watching cricket.

He also remembered his time as vice president of the Police Association, during which they fought for, and received, the flexible allowance for extra duties.

Sobers was among 56 officers promoted in early January 2017, weeks after Justice Margaret Reifer had dismissed an application by 14 officers who had challenged their non-promotion.

The 14 had claimed they were unlawfully removed from an original promotion list list submitted to the Police Service Commission by then Commissioner of Police Darwin Dottin.