No one was surprised last week when several members of the Guyana Police Force Tactical Service Unit were arraigned before the Chief Magistrate on charges of bribery and demanding money with menace. In an exceptional, but not unexpected, expression of misplaced camaraderie, constables in the unit at Eve Leary staged a protest against the police administration for its failure to keep their colleagues out of the courts and out of the newspaper headlines.
The allegations against the policemen were not unique. This newspaper, over the years, has published numerous letters from persons who complained about having had to “grease the palms of law enforcement officers” for various favours. Often, the victims of everyday, roadside shakedowns are anxious only to escape from some inconvenient punishment, or to avoid some unwarranted imposition, or to expedite some service to which they were either legally or not legally entitled.
Some road-users, pulled over for a “routine check” and falsely accused of misdemeanours, are asked to pay a bribe to avoid prosecution. Others have had cash or property stolen from them during searches. Last month, a policeman attached to the same Tactical Services Unit was arrested after he was caught driving a stolen car. Police officers have been alleged to demand hard cash for not pursuing, or for selectively pursuing, an investigation or arrest, or for not reporting illegal activities.
Given the frequency and volume of complaints and charges, it must be admitted that corruption − aimed at obtaining illegal, personal and financial benefits − has become endemic and that the police force is suffering from an “institutional culture” of graft. It is easy to blame the constables for this sort of misconduct and to drag them before the courts. But it is also clear that very little has been done at an institutional level to eradicate corruption at the higher levels of the force.
The administration’s ambivalent approach to allegations surrounding the involvement of senior police officers in corrupt transactions is partly to blame for the persistence of this problem. When he was informed that US courts had provided evidence that a senior superintendent of police had admitted that he had received money to do certain illegal things as an enforcer in the US Embassy visa racket some years ago, and that the US courts found certain other subordinate officers guilty of wrongdoing in the same matter, the former Minister of Home Affairs Mr Ronald Gajraj unconcernedly declared that the local police had no evidence to prosecute the culprits.
Similarly, when the present Minister of Home Affairs Mr Clement Rohee was asked about another senior police officer’s involvement in a narcotics scandal, he responded cheerily that the transcript of an incriminating recorded conversation between a senior police officer and a narco-trafficker made “interesting reading…” The officer has since been promoted.
No organisation can police itself effectively. But this is exactly what the two institutions established to enforce internal discipline in the police force pretend to do. The Police Complaints Authority has no investigative capability and is obliged to refer its complaints against policemen to the same police force for investigation. The Office of Professional Responsibility, headed by a retired officer, has no independence and can investigate only those matters referred to it by the commissioner of police. Policemen have little to fear from these two weak watchdogs.
Corrupt juniors become corrupt seniors who are unlikely to correct corrupt juniors, and so on. That’s the way the wheels stay greased. Is it any wonder that the constables behave as they do when they see their superintendents and other superiors accepting backhanders with impunity?