Dear Editor,
For well over a decade our news media have been omitting to mention any description of alleged attackers, whether they be in robberies, killings, etc. it seems that, at a time when so very little intelligence exists on criminals and their movements, some description given by a victim(s) and/or eye witness(es) to an incident may help considerably in narrowing down a suspect e.g. “Of East Indian descent about 5’6″ tall, brown in complexion and wearing blue shirt and three-quarter blue hard pants, hair close-cropped, etc.” In the absence of anything else, can’t we re-introduce publishing some details on attackers? Many bandits don’t care to hide themselves any more because the media do an excellent job for them.
I was in the USA and Canada recently and I noted that such descriptions were carried in the papers and TV. Are we in Guyana more sophisticated than those societies or do we have a greater sense of political correctness?
Can someone posit a logically sane reason why we can’t do the same in Guyana? Whose sensitivities are we scared to touch? At whose expense? It bothers me that criminals have all the protection while victims are at the receiving end.
Yours faithfully,
T. Jabour
Editor’s note
Descriptions of alleged attackers are fraught with risk. First, they feed ethnic stereotyping which can inflame tensions in killings such as those at Lusignan and Bartica. Second, very general descriptions can hardly be helpful to police investigations when published in the newspaper a day later. Taking the writer’s example, “Of East Indian descent, about 5′ 6″ tall, brown in complexion and wearing a blue shirt and three-quarter blue hard pants”, this would apply to a large number of persons and a day after the event it is of little value.
The recipient of such descriptions should be without doubt the police force. They can then immediately act on this information and apprehend the suspects in the minutes after the crime. This, we believe, is the gravamen of the matter raised by the writer. Were the police reacting immediately to crimes and acting on the available intelligence we would not have to be concerned about descriptions in the media after the fact. When the suspects are apprehended by the police and charged, their names and, in some cases, photos are there for all to see.
Third, in a multiracial society like ours with an increasing degree of interracial relationships it may sometimes be difficult to accurately hazard a guess about race and it would be counterproductive to refer to m
