C.O.P: SMALL BRAINED, BUT WELL HUNG

Every day, I can count on at least two new email messages in my inbox. One is an offer to make my penis bigger, harder, or improve my sexual stamina. The second is an unsolicited request from some African nation for money. Maybe I’ve won the lottery. Maybe someone left me millions in a will. Maybe the descendants of some billionaire or former despot need my account number to transfer their ill-gotten gains. Sometimes, millions in African oil money will flood my bank account if I just wire an initial “processing fee” to some remote corner of the Motherland.

Despite all these generous offers, I still have a tiny penis and an empty bank account. To paraphrase Forrest Gump, I'm not a smart man, but I know what a scam is.

Evidently, our esteemed Chief of Police is not a smart man.

National embarrassment. National joke. National outrage. Take your pick. They’re all accurate. Our highest-ranking police officer taken in by a common Internet hoax? Sending money off to Senegal VIA WESTERN UNION for. . . what? The details of the story are too stupid to waste time recounting. In fact, even if he hadn’t been scammed, he’d still have to explain to the Vincentian public why he was paying good money to traipse off to some non-essential shindig in Senegal when the economy is still sputtering back to life.

The Chief of Police has offered to repay the taxpayers’ money that he wired off to the international scammers. Good. But, really, that’s not nearly enough. He must be punished. Maybe not fired (maybe), but definitely punished. He has embarrassed the country and brought the entire police force into disrepute. Him paying the money back is a given. It’s expected. But he needs a penalty beyond that. And, going forward, the discretionary spending of the Chief of Police needs independent oversight. He can’t be trusted with any degree of fiscal autonomy.

I bet he has a huge penis, though.