Dear Editor,
It is doubtful that any reasonable thinking person would call into question the value of community policing in the universal contest against rising crime levels. In fact, ask any Minister of Home Affairs and his Commissioner of Police and they will tell you of the premium value placed on community policing these days.
Truly speaking, the doctrine of community policing is nothing new. It has been around for quite some time, but since mainstream policing which is bereft of willing participation by the citizenry, has been failing, there is a renewed and expanded emphasis on the philosophy at the national, regional and international levels.
Community policing is held in such high esteem that its importance was emphasized by the Prime Minister of St Lucia in his feature address to the Association of Caribbean Commission-ers of Police in 2001.
On that occasion he said:
“The philosophy requires that police departments develop a new relationship with the law-abiding people in the community, allowing them a greater voice in setting local priorities and involving them in efforts to improve the overall quality of life in their neighbourhood.”
There can be no doubt that central to community policing and policing in general, is public confidence in the police, because where this critical ingredient is lacking, every type of crime from simple assault to murder remains undetected and unsolved.
Public confidence is like credibility and respect, which must be earned through demonstrated integrity and admirable performance. However, it is no secret that for some time now it has been at an all-time low in our police force which is yet to be renamed police services, and thereby take on a more friendly face.
The low level of public confidence which besets law enforcement is not unique to Guyana. Rather it is something which seems to have infected other Caricom states.
This is evidenced in an observation of Justice Rajendra Narine from Trinidad, who noted that in the courts these days there was a tendency for the jury to doubt the evidence given by the police and said, “It says something about the confidence the public has in the police.”
The courts in Guyana have not made a similar pronouncement, but judging from the number of voir-dire which we are currently having, it may not be too difficult to arrive at a similar conclusion.
But how can the public have confidence in the police when the police give very little reason for doing so? Indeed, because of recent major successes on the crime-fighting platform, we are beginning to once again repose confidence in them, but a few weeks ago we read of a man’s sheep being stolen from the police pound at a station on the Essequibo coast.
This may seem like a simple matter but to me it speaks volumes of the competence of the police, and should be thoroughly investigated. It should attract no less importance than our missing weapons and unsolved murders.
The incident is certainly reminiscent of a case in Trinidad where 75 kilos of cocaine were lodged at a police station but by the time the matter went to trial 32 kilos disappeared. So disgusting and agonizing was the incident that Justice Volney in whose court the matter was being heard “accused the police of being human rats who stole the cocaine.”
I don’t think that we should be so disrespectful of our lawmen and label them like that, but I certainly believe that the case of the missing sheep should be investigated with the same zest and zeal that were accorded the recent Mazaruni jailbreak.
I rather suspect that it was either incompetence or negligence which resulted in the disappearance of the sheep.
But whatever is the real reason, we are certainly entitled to know. After all, rats could have eaten the cocaine in Trinidad, but I doubt that they could have had such enormous appetite in Guyana to eat a whole sheep in one night.
Yours faithfully,
Francis Carryl
