Mykonos mayor appeals for more police on popular holiday island

The mayor of Mykonos has appealed for more police officers to be dispatched to the upscale Greek holiday island, where, he says, the local force is too small to deal with the pressure of increased tourism and crime over the peak summer period.

In a July 26 letter marked “urgent,” Mayor Dimitris Tzanos warned new Citizens' Protection Minister Michalis Chrysochoidis that the island's police force is “tragically understaffed” and unable to respond to a spike in thefts, burglaries and drug-related offenses, but also in violence.

Marked “urgent,” the letter published on the website of the Greek edition of Huffington Post goes on to demand more officers and at least two units of the Greek Police's OPKE force, which specializes in more serious crimes, while adding that the municipal authority has set aside funds to help cover the officers' cost of living.

Lamenting that the holiday island, which receives some 2 million tourists a year, “feels abandoned by the state,” Tzanos added that the response from in the area of law and order have been “unsatisfactory.”

The mayor's plea came a day after a man was shot and injured on the island in an apparent turf war between rival gangs and before authorities in the Greek capital's port of Piraeus on Sunday arrested a 33-year-old man carrying a small arsenal of weapons onto a Mykonos-bound ferry boat.