The Business Editorial
The advent of IMPACT under retired Commissioner of Police Laurie Lewis was the first in a succession of relatively recent special policing initiatives designed to arrest the scourge of urban crime. IMPACT emerged against the backdrop of an upsurge in crime that targeted, chiefly though not exclusively, the business types, persons whose pursuits made them ideal targets. The pattern of attacks included holdups at business places, daring daylight robberies targeting persons carrying sales takings, payrolls and other large sums of money and invading private residences where large sums of money were believed to be stored and where homes were known to double up as business premises. The criminals were invariably heavily armed and ruthless. They killed, sometimes for no apparent reason sometimes because their victims sought to offer resistance.
Impact was intended to ramp up the police presence and to provide a quick response to crimes. What IMPACT also did was to establish a closer relationship between the police and the business community. Indeed, it will be recalled that Commissioner Lewis actually managed to secure material contributions to the Force’s crime-fighting efforts in the forms of motor vehicles and, on occasion, weapons.
Since IMPACT, various other anti-crime policing initiatives designed to provide a greater measure of protection for the business community have been applied. The one that comes easiest to mind was the deployment of pairs of black-clad, heavily armed policemen across various parts of the city. It is, of course, for the police to say whether and to what extent these various initiatives have worked. What the available evidence certainly suggests is that these measures appear to have done little to remove the pall of psychological insecurity and the fear of armed and violent robbery within the business community. These days, every business owner worth their salt has installed some measure of electronic security – and we have not taken their word for this, we have checked with some of the electronic security vendors and they have reported that this is indeed the case. There has also been evidence of heightened security guard presence to the extent where the head of one of the more prominent security services publicly declared that people who were prepared to provide that particular service were in short supply.
Unquestionably, the criminals are thinking men and women. They have adjusted their strategies in response to the various police measures and somehow it seems that they are always several jumps ahead of the police. They strike through what they perceive to be windows of vulnerability, apparently homing in on gaps of weakness and indifference on the part of the business community that also appear to take account of the particular police strategy that is in vogue at the time. It appears too that even as the police are revisiting the extant strategy the criminals are already in the process of adjusting their own modus operandi. It appears too, uncannily some might say, that the criminals are able to measure the risks that attend their escapades and gauge both the timeliness and the likely extent and effectiveness of the police response, circumstances that have led to claims that some crimes are aided by rogue policemen who provide the criminals with valuable intelligence. Whatever the truth or otherwise of this claim, the astonishingly high success rate of robberies targeting business operators and business premises certainly does leave one to wonder. Indeed, it is the seemingly limited police success in either preventing or solving robberies that target the business community that has engendered the sense of psychological unease within the private sector.
It appeared at one time too that the criminals were banking on a perception of a monopoly of force, that is a seemingly greater access to sophisticated weaponry that actually led to the notion that the criminals were themselves better equipped than the police; and even if this were not the case the proliferation of sophisticated weaponry in the commission of crimes suggested that one of the biggest challenges facing the police was that of staunching the flow of weapons into the hands of criminals, presumably from across our porous borders.
We are in the midst of another season of crimes that target the business community and this time around there is evidence that we are confronted by a more organized and well thought out phenomenon. Evidence of this is to be found in the fact that interior locations, specifically gold-mining communities, are currently the focus of criminal attacks. Police Commissioner Henry Greene has himself conceded this, pointing out that the attacks on mining camps is driven by the criminals’ knowledge of the high price of gold. That, however, is only one consideration. As Guyana Gold and Diamond Miners Association (GGDMA) Executive Secretary Edward Shields told this newspaper a few weeks ago, the criminals are also aware of the physical weaknesses that attend policing in the interior locations and of the fact that once they can negate the responses from the mining camps themselves they need not bother about the law arriving to deter them.
If the given East Coast Demerara and Georgetown addresses of members of a recently arrested gang are anything to go by, it would have meant that they would have had to ‘learn’ the interior, to come to understand the terrain, both land and sea, to create strategic interior hideouts and holding positions and, after they would have accomplished their dastardly missions, to plan and effect what in some cases are certain to be risky return journeys to the coast. These pursuits require both careful planning, the recruitment of suitably physically and mentally equipped personnel and the acquisition of some amount of specialized inventory. Here again, the issue of exactly who the masterminds are behind these crimes arises.
Little has been heard so far of the outcomes of Wednesday’s scheduled meeting between Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee and the private sector though we are told that the Private Sector Commission was to have tabled its own recommendations regarding possible responses to this particular wave of attacks against the business community. The question arises, of course, as to whether and for how long the measures agreed to during Wednesday’s engagement will keep the criminals at bay and whether, for that matter, those measures will take account of the vulnerabilities that now decidedly extend to interior locations. These, assuredly, will require a measure of security response that extends far beyond state/private sector dialogue and into major organizational and structural changes that enhance the physical as much as the tactical capacity to police the interior areas. Issues of manpower, training and costs arise and whether our local law-enforcement capacity can, in the short term, be raised to the required level is certainly a question worth raising.
As far as the coastal challenge is concerned much can perhaps be accomplished by seeking to urge the business community to pay more attention to considerations like management of cash transit operations, investment in IT-driven security infrastructure and the altogether incomprehensible practice of having private homes double up as business premises, thereby rendering their occupants vulnerable to armed attacks.
These, however, are not enough to meet the challenge. The magnitude of the problem suggests that there is really no way around a regime of comprehensive police reform that conceptualizes, plans and effects a national policing strategy that is equal to the contemporary criminal challenge.