As Emancipation Day dawned in Georgetown, several innocent adolescents celebrated the anniversary with shouts of “We want freedom” because they were still locked up in the Guyana Police Force’s detention centre in Brickdam station.
From Wednesday July 30 and continuing through Thursday July 31, Friday August 1 and Saturday August 2, armed special squad policemen in dark uniforms without required regulation identifying numbers swarmed five East Bank Demerara villages – Agricola, Bagotstown, Eccles, Houston and McDoom – and started a systematic round up of nearly six dozen young persons. As with the selection of the villages, the selection of victims was not random. Most were minors and all were male.
Minister of Home Affairs Mr Clement Rohee and Commissioner of Police Mr Henry Greene are still to declare to the parents and to the public at large what was the justification for this unwarranted campaign since most of the victims were legally children. According to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child to which Guyana is signatory, a child is defined as “every human being below the age of 18 years unless, under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier.”
Reports from relatives, which have not been contradicted by the minister or the commissioner, indicate that no warnings were given, no warrants were issued for the arrests, no victim was involved in unlawful conduct, and none was known to be a wanted person. Accounts of the victims’ activities at the actual moment of arrest indicated their innocence. Some were at home working on the computer; playing Nintendo games; speaking on the telephone; disembarking from a minibus; returning from a supermarket; and going to the barber shop.
The victims were taken away by the police to be “processed,” police talk for being photographed, fingerprinted, and having their personal details recorded, although they had never committed an offence. For good measure, despite being minors, the victims were also kept in custody in the dreadful, dank, dark dungeon that is called the ‘lockups’ at Brickdam Police Station. Eventually, they were all released without explanation.
The practice of stigmatising particular persons in particular villages has become a popular police practice over the past decade. It is intended to intimidate the villagers and to create the illusion of investigation when in fact there is only intimidation.
The shameful East Bank crackdown is not the first time that the police force has done this sort of thing. Collective criminalisation was invented during the short, troubled tenure of Ms Gail Teixeira as Minister of Home Affairs. Back in October 2005, Ms Teixeira tried to rationalise the unlawful arrest of 140 residents of the Buxton-Friendship village complex who were transported to police headquarters at Eve Leary where they were “processed” by being photographed, fingerprinted, and having their personal details recorded, by the police.
On that occasion, when asked about the legality of arresting and processing persons as part of the notorious ‘Operation Stiletto,’ Ms Teixeira vacuously averred: “In the United States, you do not have to be a criminal to be photographed and identified by bio-metric identification and, once you do that, you can be identified in say, for example, a car accident, if the body is beyond recognition…There will be a database as in other societies; this is nothing unusual. It is done in every part of the developed world.” It was unusual, however, that only two communities have ever been selected for this mode of identification in this country.
Not only did the recent crackdown target a particular type of victim, and was located in a particular type of village but it was programmed to occur at a particular time in the political calendar. It was at the close of the People’s Progressive Party’s 27th Congress at Port Mourant, in July 2002 that a gang of bandits killed two policemen and a young congress delegate in the nearby town of Rose Hall.
Fearing a recurrence, understandably, the pre-emptive crackdown occurred just prior to the two-day 29th congress of the ruling People’s Progressive Party which began on Saturday 2nd August at the Diamond Secondary School, a mere 8 km from the Agricola-Bagotstown-Eccles-Houston-McDoom village complex.
The clampdown might have been excusable if the victims were known delinquents or were actually breaking the law. But they weren’t.
Instead of being punished as individuals for committing specific acts, these children have now been mistreated as if they belonged to a homogenous collective. They are not criminals but the police treated them as if they are.
Police clampdowns such as the mass arrests in targeted villages on the East Coast and East Bank do not “teach children a lesson” in citizenship. They inculcate a mindset of alienation, discrimination and victimisation. Criminalising children is not only illegal. It is illogical because it will perpetuate the problems that it should be trying to solve!
