Is the killing of a fisherman by a posse of pirates or the killing of a businessman by a gang of bandits, so different from the killing of a suspect by a squad of policemen? Is the plight of the children of a village woman who was shot dead while walking home from nursery school along a public road in broad daylight any different from the pain of children whose mother was shot dead in an attack by burglars?
Should a traffic accident that kills and injures passengers on the Linden highway elicit condemnation while a police operation in a village that kills three or four ‘suspects’ and injures bystanders pass without public complaint? Should the public condemn the shooting by bandits as murder yet condone the fatal shooting of suspects by the police?
There are more questions than answers. The facts are that criminal and political violence over the decades contributed much to the degeneration of public perceptions of death and the value of life. As a result, some groups in this country have grown accustomed to commemorating certain catastrophes while deliberately ignoring others. Most people, naturally, care for some lives more than they do for others anyway and some lives do not really matter much at all. But, is not the life of one human being of equal value and as worthy of protection as another?
Today, human life is cheap, the consequence of the chronic failure to enforce laws which protect life, or to ensure that its unnatural loss is investigated. The police force, the public agency that should do most to protect life, unfortunately, has done much to endanger it though some cases are not clear cut and blameworthiness is difficult to determine.
The police shot a foreigner dead in a tangled narco-trafficking and kidnapping drama which ended in the Pomeroon; shot dead a 22-year-old man described as a suspected carjacker at Old England, Upper Demerara; shot dead a suspect in the New Amsterdam armed robbery case at Bush Nai Nai, up the Canje Creek, Berbice; and shot two more villagers dead during Operation Ferret in the Buxton-Friendship community, East Coast Demerara.
The police also shot dead three teenage suspects in a robbery at Non Pareil, also on the East Coast Demerara, during what was called a ‘gun battle.’ There is little doubt that the amateurish adolescents, one of whom was armed with a handgun, were up to no good. But, in the event, even after the imperilled family had escaped, police moved in on the suspects, cornering two of them who were cowering in a little bathroom and shooting both of them dead. The third suspect ran out the house but was felled by a single fatal bullet as he attempted to flee. It is tempting to think that the adolescents’ deaths were deserved but the event turned out to be more of a duck shoot than a law enforcement operation in which the possibility of arrest was not yet exhausted.
There is no doubt that bandits and pirates, by and large, are a nasty bunch against whom the use of force is often justifiable. The discovery of the bound bodies of fishermen washed up on the Corentyne foreshore and the callous killing of two men in a rum shop at Mon Repos on the East Coast are ample evidence of this. Perhaps, also, the chopping to death of a petty thief who tried to steal a wall picture from a house at Corriverton was another example of a citizen’s conviction that human life was cheaper than the property which was about to be purloined.
The actions and attitudes of the public demonstrate a dangerous drift into the dubious domain of double standards towards unnatural death. The killing of a citizen, regardless of who the victim is and who the assailant might be, is a matter that should be vigorously condemned and thoroughly investigated whenever it occurs.
Unless the administration and its law enforcement agencies lead the way in establishing and enforcing higher standards of public safety under which the sanctity of human life is upheld, we shall be ushering in a far more dangerous year in 2008 than the one we are leaving behind in 2007.
