Tuesday 3 December 2002 was an ordinary workaday morning at the start of the Christmas shopping season in Georgetown’s central business district. A gang of gunmen leaving the crime scene after robbing a cambio caught sight of unarmed constable Quincy James who was directing traffic at the intersection of Regent and King Streets. The gangsters stopped long enough to pump a dozen and a half bullets into the policeman’s young body from their assault rifles before returning to their lair unconcerned, unhurried and unimpeded.
Constable James’s execution was the eleventh of twelve police deaths that year. Altogether, these murders exposed the Guyana Police Force’s frailty, vulnerability and inability to preserve public safety or even to protect its own members. They also represented the lowest level of the police force’s transparency in its operations and accountability to the public. It was understood at the time that James’s murder, like the other score that occurred during the Troubles in 2002-2003, was in retaliation for the police force’s own far too frequent uninvestigated involvement in the killing of suspects, especially by the black-uniformed, blood-stained, grimly-named Target Special Squad.
In Mr Ronald Gajraj’s heyday as Minister of Home Affairs, public safety in this country came under the combined pressure of armed robberies, contraband-smuggling, gun-running, money-laundering, narcotics-trafficking, disappearances, kidnapping, massacres, prison escapes, death squads, drug gangs, arson, rural riots and trafficking in persons. Not surprisingly, Mr Gajraj was eventually obliged to resign his portfolio in response to demands for his dismissal from friendly foreign countries, the suspension of his Canadian and USA visas, and the ambiguous report of an unprecedented presidential commission of inquiry into his alleged involvement in directing death squads.
Responses
But by that time, the security situation had already seriously degenerated. It was clear that something extraordinary had to be done to prepare the police force to face the challenges of crime and violence. In that crisis, the earliest efforts at security sector reform came from the administration itself. Back in 2002, in response to the outbreak of the Troubles on the East Coast Demerara, President Bharrat Jagdeo personally promulgated a $100M package and menu of measures improve the police force’s crime-fighting capacity.
Those reform measures included a complete review of the existing legislation on crime; comprehensive reform of intelligence-gathering, analysis and dissemination; improving the Criminal Investigation Department’s investigative and forensic capability; establishing a specialised training school where policemen would be exposed to modern methods of anti-crime tactics and creating a ‘crack squad’ along the lines of a special weapons and tactics team. The same year, the president travelled to London and personally met the Commis-sioner of the Metropolitan Police to seek assistance for his counter-crime campaign.
Reform
Little was achieved on the local counter-crime plan and resort was made to seeking foreign assistance. In response to President Jagdeo’s specific request for security assistance, the British government sent the Defence Advisory Team to Georgetown in March 2003 to conduct a study of the security sector. The team subsequently produced a report recommending ways in which the police force’s capability could be enhanced. Training assistance started soon afterwards. Chief Superintendent Paul Robinson of the Metropolitan Police, who had been a member of the Defence Advisory Team, returned to the country the next year and actually trained 100 members of the police force’s Tactical Services Unit to become the core of this country’s special weapons and tactics strike force.
That 2003 report, however, was not the first British study of the security sector. The Symonds Group Limited − consultants for the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development − had released its report on the police force after reviewing it between October and November 2000. That report was aimed at helping the force’s senior management to determine the functions of an accountable, professional force, developing a community-based policing style and helping the government to identify the areas to strengthen performance, accountability and community orientation of the force. The establishment of a witness protection programme and better management of information, particularly with regard to fighting the drug trade, were also recommended.
Arguably, if the administration had taken that 2000 report seriously by implementing its recommendations, the reform of the police force could have started earlier and it would have been better prepared to face the challenges of the Troubles of 2002-2003.
After assessing the ineffectual level of law enforcement, acknowledging its inadequacy in gathering intelligence to counter newer forms of criminal activity and to penetrate the networks of narco-traffickers and other criminals, and mindful of the deficiencies brought to light by the major reports that had been written up to that time, the police force itself established a Task Force on Organisation Change.
The task force aimed at bringing about change in areas that include attitudes, traffic, information technology, public education and interaction, counselling, compulsory tutoring in foreign languages, and training in forensics and prosecution, among other things. In so doing, however, it failed to deal with security reform in a holistic manner and, having no full-time management team, its efforts were inadequate to transform the force in a significant way.
Reports
A new chapter in security sector reform opened the next year with a meeting between President Jagdeo and Baroness Valerie Amos, the sympathetic, Guyana-born former Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. In April 2006, the two agreed to a Statement of Principles which formed the basis on which the British Department for International Development proceeded with a fresh consultancy. President Jagdeo met with a new security sector reform team led by Professor Eboe Hutchful in October and, in addition to moving the reform process forwards, integrated various local and foreign initiatives into a holistic strategy. It was on the basis of that team’s report that British High Commissioner Mr Fraser Wheeler and Head of the Presidential Secretariat Dr Roger Luncheon signed an Interim Memorandum of Understanding for a Security Sector Reform Action Plan in August 2007.
The action plan comprises the elements of strengthening policy-making across the security sector; building the police force’s operational capacity; mainstreaming financial management in the security sector into public sector financial management reform; creating substantial parliamentary and other oversight of the security sector; and building greater public participation and inclusiveness on security sector issues. High Commissioner Wheeler expressed the view that the full implementation of the action plan would provide substantial additional security to the people, increase the confidence of foreign and domestic businesses to invest in the economy and, through strengthened transparency and accountability, enhance open governance in the country.
It is clear, therefore, that there has been no shortage of hand-shaking, visiting consultants, report-writing, agreement-signing and technical training over the past eight years. But have these activities and personalities significantly improved public safety or raised the level of police performance?
So far, several agencies have been involved in delivering assistance. Paul Morisetti, International Policing Advisor for Latin America and the Caribbean, spearheaded a task force of police officers from the National Policing Improvement Agency International Academy at Bramshill and the Scottish Police College to implement the action plan following the signing of the memorandum of understanding last August.
The Scottish Police College, in particular, has executed several projects since 2004. Starting with a scoping exercise to assess the police force’s training requirements in December 2004, it then conducted a series of management training programmes in February-June 2005, an assessment of the impact of the previously delivered training programmes in December 2005, and a scoping exercise in May 2006. Those were followed in June 2006 by the presentation of the Guyana Police Force Strategic Plan in partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank as part of the Guyana Citizens Security Programme. It also executed a project to assess the police force’s operational capability in October 2007.
Norms
The British government has been careful enough to prescribe conditionalities in the memorandum of understanding, obliging the Guyana government to conform to established norms. For example, the administration was required to table in the National Assembly its summary action plan and motions to establish special select committees on the Disciplined Forces Commission report and to review the action plan’s implementation, among other things. The intention is that security sector reform in Guyana must eventually go far beyond the police force’s short-term needs and lay the foundation for a safe, secure and more humane society.
The Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development-Development Assistance Committee has defined security sector reform as seeking to increase a country’s ability to meet the range of security needs within society “in a manner consistent with democratic norms and sound principles of governance, transparency and the rule of law [that] includes, but extends well beyond, the narrower focus of more traditional security assistance on defence, intelligence and policing.” Guyana’s Security Sector Reform Action Plan, therefore, is a generic prescription based on established guiding principles, tailored to national needs but in accord with international security norms.
Over the past eight years, the British government has developed security sector reform strategies on the bases of which several unstable states around the world have received assistance. The strategy aims at helping weak states to “fulfil their legitimate security functions through reforms that will make the delivery of security more democratically accountable, as well as more effective and efficient…” Guyana is one such state.
Traumatised by the Troubles on the East Coast and elsewhere, this country and the police force can only benefit from the ongoing security sector reform process. It is not without significance that, as the tempo of police reform increased, the killing of policemen such as constable Quincy James ceased!
