December 19, 2019

Incompetence at it's Finest

Forewarning: This is going to be a very long review regarding the Bahamian Criminal Records Office. The Bahamian Criminal Records office is possibly the most incompetent office I've ever had the misfortune of having to go through to obtain a police record. My husband, a Bahamian being overseas needed his police record. We went on the Bahamian website provided. There's no phone contact or direct method of payment, also the address they have to mail documents to we later found out is not the actual address for police records so it can be weeks or months or never that your mail reaches the office for Criminal Records plus their police department email address is down and has been down for months. We found all this out after weeks had gone by after we mailed the documents with no response. After calling around and getting sent in circles we finally got a hold of the Criminal Records office (Which is 242-502-2001 by the way). I wanted to find out if our document reached to the Bahamas and this woman (Ms. Rodriguez) was talking around in circles about how we sent the documents wrong (even though we followed the instructions from the Government of the Bahamas website) and was basically getting offended over asking her simple directions of what to do and feeling the need to let us know there are people in worst positions she's backed up with (as if it takes more than 5 minutes to check on a person's name). We were calling this woman on a weekly basis and every week she had some excuse as to why she couldn't get our document. Keep in mind all she had to do was personally retrieve the mailed documents by contacting someone in the mail pick up department in the same building to get it to her. I suggested this and she said "red tape won't allow that". She finally offered to have us resend the documents by email and she'll respond by email as to when it's ready. I still never got an email response from her as I had to continually call to ask for an update, which isn't cheap from overseas. Another month after I gave this woman a call and she said she has our document just email the name of the person who will pick up the police certificate on our behalf the following day. The following day arrives when my friend went to pick up the document, Officer Rodriguez spoke to me via my friend's phone and accused me of lying and made an excuse that she hasn't processed my documents yet and how I'm wasting my friend's time. I was vehemently angry and told this woman that she's "incompetent" and why does she need more than 2 months. Sure enough getting off the phone with her my friend told me she "miraculously" found my police certificate. Some people say the government workers there often are looking for extra money from customers in order to do their job, I can't confirm or deny this. The service at the Criminal Records Office in Nassau is egregious at best and unless you have family/friends in the Bahamas to help you with the process it's going to be months of delay if at all dealing with the Criminal Records office to process your police certificate from overseas even if you're a Bahamian. Keep in mind as a Bahamian all they need to do is look up your name in the National Database and see if there are any warrants out for your name. The process takes seconds and they issue hundreds of police record request a day for citizens that applied the previous day in the country. Good luck and hope it never gets to this