US police have been called to the California mansion of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex nine times in as many months, official figures indicate.
Since Prince Harry and Meghan Markle moved in to their Montecito home with one-year-old son Archie in July 2020, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office has responded to calls listed as phone requests, alarm activations and property crimes.
The data, obtained under freedom of information laws by the PA news agency, was released after the couple shared their security fears in their interview with Oprah Winfrey.
Officers were called four times in July 2020 after Harry and Meghan moved to Montecito from Los Angeles, where they had been temporarily living since leaving Canada at the start of the pandemic.
One call is listed as a phone request while the others are labelled “alarm activations” and all occurred in the early hours of the morning.
An August request is listed as a “(miscellaneous) priority (incident),” while there was a further alarm in November.
At 4.13pm on Christmas Eve, sheriff’s deputies were called to the property after a man was alleged to have trespassed.
Officers returned to the mansion on Boxing Day at 2.54pm for a call listed under “property crimes”.
Nickolas Brooks, 37, was booked in to jail on a misdemeanour trespassing charge and later released, the sheriff’s office said.
The most recent call was at 2.21am on February 16 this year and is listed as an alarm activation.
Representatives for Harry and Meghan declined to comment.
A spokeswoman for the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office declined to provide further details about the calls.
The couple’s security arrangements hit the headlines following the interview with chat show host Winfrey in March.
The duchess, who is pregnant with a daughter, said she sent letters pleading with Harry’s family not to take away his personal protection officers, warning he was facing death threats.
The duke said he never thought he would have his British taxpayer-funded security detail removed upon deciding to step back from royal duties.
“I was born into this position. I inherited the risk. So that was a shock to me,” he said.
Explaining his decision to leave Canada for the US during the early days of the pandemic, Harry said: “The biggest concern was while we were in Canada, in someone else’s house, I then got told, short notice, that security was going to be removed. By this point, courtesy of the Daily Mail, the world knew our exact location.
“So suddenly it dawned on me – ‘Hang on a second, the borders could be closed, we’re going to have our security removed, who knows how long lockdown is going to be, the world knows where we are, it’s not safe, it’s not secure, we probably need to get out of here’.”
-AAP
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