Presiding over the security sector’s year-end performance review, Minister of Home Affairs Mr Clement Rohee boasted that it was his understanding that the Guyana Police Force has been doing “much better” than its Caricom counterparts.
Together with his three security chiefs – the Commissioner of Police, Director of Prisons and Chief Fire Officer – the minister re-enacted the traditional, annual ritual of transmuting twelve months’ worth of statistics into successes.
Mr Rohee did make passing references to public expressions of concern about corruption; harassment; torture; piracy; prisoners escaping from custody and tardy police responses to calls for help. How could a serious security review by the minister not include critical comment on credible complaints of extra-judicial killings and charges of the involvement of a serving senior police officer in extortion and drug-trafficking? These are not minor matters. The public needs to know more.
It is quite possible that public confidence could be buoyed in the short term by pleasant press conferences. In the longer term, however, it can be more accurately measured by the filing of complaints with the Police Complaints Authority. Throughout 2007, this was done at the rate of one every other day! It is therefore misleading to assess success only in relative terms to the performance of previous years, rather than in absolute terms, to the needs of creating a safer society.
There was some good news. The mobile police patrols that started to saturate the streets for the Cricket World Cup competition appear to have suppressed the worst of the daytime street crimes. They might also have contributed to reducing the murder rate to pre-Mashramani jailbreak levels. On the other hand, the concentration of scant police resources in the city and on the East Bank and East Coast Demerara resulted, perhaps unintentionally, in a rising number of out-of-town cases of maritime piracy, rural robberies and hinterland banditry. These were all but ignored in the minister’s review. There’s really not much to boast about after all.
There is little point in reciting numbers, which anyone can read in the newspapers. What the public needs to know in sufficient detail is how the Minister of Home Affairs intends to restructure and staff the security forces to suppress the threats arising from the growth of organised crime. In particular, what is to be done to staunch the entrenched traffic in narcotics, fuel, guns, young girls and assorted contraband commodities?
Understanding and unravelling the causes of these crimes, and how they are critically connected to each other, have become mired in the minutes of myriad ministerial committees, consultations and task forces.
The ministry’s approach to these serious crimes has suggested that highly-publicised promises and short-term responses might have supplanted a long-term strategy to suppress them.
Considering the multitude of security issues which all present challenges to the administration, little analysis seems to have been made of the complex interactions among serious crimes that create the context for today’s security agenda.
What, for example, will be the trends in trans-national and local crime for the next five years? What human resources need to be recruited to staff the security forces and bureaucracy? What sorts of aviation, information, maritime and transportation assets will be acquired to counter the well-equipped gangsters? How will the ministry repair the years of slippages of the long-promised Citizens Security Programme, Crime Stoppers Project and National Drug Strategy Master Plan?
There is no point in splurging billions of dollars that fail to deal adequately with such obvious security shortcomings. Beyond these specifics lie fundamental constitutional issues posed by the recent spate of extra-judicial killings, police beatings and the resort to torture in military and police camps at Ayanganna and Eve Leary.
At the start of another year, the public does not need more cant. It is time for details. Brickdam will continue to suffer from the effects of ad hocery, making the system ever more opaque, until it promulgates some sort of coherent national security strategy to replace the plethora of British DfID-sponsored emergency plans, disparate IDB-funded programmes and projects and local temporary task forces.
The public wants to see a comprehensive strategy to confront challenges posed by rampant fuel and commodity smuggling; roving gangs of bandits and posses of pirates; narco-trafficking cartels; prison breakouts; arson at Bartica and elsewhere; complaints about police excesses; ‘discoveries’ of illegal airstrips and other serious crimes.
Present and future threats to public safety demand it.
