It took Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee more than a week after the killing of 16 year-old Patentia schoolboy Kelvin Fraser to concede that the policeman who fired the fatal bullet acted improperly. That was not really surprising. It has now become commonplace for the police to take refuge behind a wall of brief and baffling responses to occurrences like the Fraser killing that lack either detail or clarity. Usually, the statements do no more than send a familiar message that the public’s right to know is not particularly high on the list of priorities of the Guyana Police Force. The GPF continue to slip deeper into a terrible area of darkness in which they are simply unaccustomed to owning up to their not unfamiliar indiscretions. The real surprise, therefore, was that a comment of sorts was forthcoming from the Home Affairs Minister.
Interestingly, the killing of the West Bank schoolboy came just days after retiring Assistant Commissioner of Police Paul Slowe had used more than one of his exit fora to launch a broadside against corruption, indiscipline and a lack of professionalism in the organization with which he served for more than 30 years. Slowe even alluded to the dreaded period of the Phantom Squad, a shadowy group of killers alleged to have been controlled by former Home Affairs Minister Ronald Gajraj, their particular assignment, purportedly, to effect a regime of extra judicial executions targeting mostly young African Guyanese males deemed to have been criminals. Usually a testy ‘customer’ in most circumstances, Rohee was clearly rattled by Slowe’s outburst. The near-retired Slowe, however, had timed his remarks in a manner that placed him beyond the possibility of the kind of official sanction to frankness that so many who work in state agencies fear.
In a sense, the nature of the Fraser Killing evoked memories of the Phantom Squad. Indefensible in its barefacedness and clinical in its execution, the slaying of the teenager visibly traumatized his colleagues and evoked a brief interlude of protest both on the West Bank and in Georgetown. The latter protest attracted a characteristically comical and indelicate distraction by the police when the truck that transported Fraser’s protesting school friends to the city was detained.
The police’s story is that Fraser was blown away by a bullet from a policeman’s gun during a “scuffle. No one has ‘bought’ that story. There have simply been too many ill-explained “scuffles” and other confrontations with the police in which people have ended up dead and the fact that the authorities hardly ever trouble themselves either to properly investigate these killings or even to attempt to placate the victims’ relatives has rendered the credibility of the Force virtually non-existent. That apart, the patent absence of any kind of creativity in police accounts of encounters with people who often end up dead is believed in some quarters to be part of a culture of disregard for public opinion. There is, though, a second school of thought that contends that the quality of the official statements usually emanating from Eve Leary in circumstances such as this is reflective of an gross ineptitude even in the matter of the management of its image.
What sort of scuffle with an unarmed sixteen year-old schoolboy, one asks, can lead to him being shot dead by a policeman? Little wonder that familiar whispers of “execution” and “murder” have been floating around since the killing.
Officialdom appears to have become altogether unmindful of ‘the bigger picture.’ The thick veil of suspicion that usually en-velopes official accounts of police killings has, more than anything else, contributed to loss of public confidence in the police and, by extension the effectiveness of policing. Moreover, when no official report on the police killing of a sixteen year-old schoolboy is forthcoming almost two weeks after the incident the authorities can hardly expect the citizenry to hold the police in much more than considerable contempt.
To the customary public outrage that usually attends these seemingly senseless killings has, on this occasion, been added a moving display of grief and anger by schoolchildren, pained and traumatized by the reality of one of their number, a friend and colleague, dying in such a manner. The killing of Kelvin Fraser injures the image of the political administration in more ways than one. Apart from the accustomed role of the police in attracting international charges of human rights transgressions against the government, Fraser’s death raises searching questions about the effectiveness with which public policy on the protection of children is administered.
There is, too, a galling frustration over the reality an outraged citizenry that appears able to do little more than grin and bear it. The truth of the matter is that the often ultra-aggressive posture of the police in pursuit of their law-enforcement responsibilities, is, at least in part, a function of the frailty of public protest over occurrences like the Fraser killing. It shows in the refusal, up until now, of Commissioner of Police Henry Greene to assert his own independence and professionalism by publicly accounting for an incident that has further seriously tarnished the image of the police force that he heads, choosing instead to place in the firing line the Office of Professional Responsibility, a creature of the Commissioner, which has no authority to function outside the directives of the Top Cop.
It is, critics of the Police Force say, a matter of a lack of training. Some go further, asserting that the kind of police heavy-handedness that attended the Fraser shooting is the Force’s chosen way of maintaining law and order in circumstances where unpopularity with the public has made alternative, less aggressive methods decidedly more difficult. From the standpoint of the GPF’s particular perspective on law-enforcement, there may well be no viable option.
Politics persists as the bane of the GPF’s existence. It shows in the misplaced assertiveness of the administration in its rejection of funding attended by technical involvement from the British Government for a police reform programme. Indeed, President Bharrat Jagdeo’s recent quizzical assertion that Guyana does not need British financial help in pushing security reform here is decidedly at odds with the professed shortage of resources, which by the admission of the GPF itself, has hobbled its effectiveness.
There are, of course, those who are far inclined to the view that the government prefers to forego the UK’s security reform financing offer than surrender control of an institution whose operational posture is widely believed to be shaped by the political will of the incumbent administration.
There is a familiar ring to the cries of the slain teenager’s family for “justice.” Whether or not the killing of Kelvin Fraser will now compel the legal system to take an incisive inward look on the flagrant flaws that have come to characterize policing in Guyana is difficult to tell. Precedent hardly gives rise to a great deal of optimism.