Dear Editor,
Piggybacking on my comments in the discussion forum of your newspaper under the news story, ‘We could have taken care of Buxton, Fineman sooner -Jagdeo tells police conference,’ (February 4), let me add that the President and his government could have taken care of most all law enforcement problems long before Rondell ‘Fineman’ Rawlins and Roger Khan, if only the Guyana Police Force had undergone long overdue reforms.
The PPP came back in power in 1992, fully cognizant of the fact that it had inherited a police force that was politically compromised, underpaid, and seen by many recruits as an easy means to make a corrupt dollar via the bribery route. Corruption in the police force started under the PNC but continued under the PPP.
Moreover, the police force, like the Guyana Defence Force, usually voted before everyone else, and their results were made public to send a message to all that the security apparatus was fully behind the PNC government. This obviously disturbed the PPP in post-’92 elections.
And even when the PNC began its post-’92 elections street protests and demonstrations that became violent and destructive, the police never made major arrests of top PNC officials, giving the impression they were sympathetic to the PNC. By the time PNC Leader Desmond Hoyte died in 2002, it was clear that not only was the police force corrupted by money and politics, it was also clear that the force needed a major overhauling to make it a truly professional law enforcement body. End the political interference and let it do its job.
But then the argument by some critics of the PPP government during the entire period was that government did not want to invest more money than was necessary on the police force if the force remained loyal to the PNC, given its voting patterns. And if this was indeed the case, it merely emboldened corrupt officers to become worse, and also probably explained why the PPP government went from peachy clean to plain corrupt. Corrupt officials who knew the police were too corrupt to bring charges, simply had to ‘grease the palms’ of officers and make cases disappear. It was a perfect marriage of convenience made in Guyana.
But then the chickens started coming home to roost when corruption reached alarmingly visible heights, with some persons going from rags to riches lifestyles overnight. Discrimination then became a political rallying cry of those feeling left out of the lifestyles of the newly rich and famous, and the next thing we saw was the vortex in which criminal elements, posing as political agitators, began ripples of criminal attacks designed to get at government and the ripples became crashing and crushing waves.
When the government, already overtaken by corruption, tried to get the police to do something about the attacks, it was too late; both the police and officialdom were compromised by corrupt practices. Therefore, rather than bringing in foreign help there was a reliance on a drug baron, who flourished untouched by the state, as he spent his own money on financing the now infamous Phantom Squad.
The drug baron has his own motives beyond appearing to be patriotic, but even prior to his squad’s emergence, drug smuggling was a major activity in Guyana that grew unfettered by the state, and the illicit proceeds from this activity were laundered into businesses, which government even adverted to as signs of progress and development.
Anyway, with government being forced to rely on the Phantom Squad to save it from collapsing under the wanton criminality of heavily armed gangs, it ceded the high moral ground of being the principal defender/upholder of the law. Indeed, the Phantom Squad was disbanded as its leader was chased out of Guyana into Suriname and then into the waiting arms of the US DEA agents in Trinidad.
But if there ever was another opportune moment that government could have finally undertaken police reforms, it was at the climax of the era of wanton criminality and the seemingly politically inspired departure of ex-top cop, Mr Winston Felix, whose office phone was bugged by the aforementioned drug baron.
In fact, the Jagdeo government had actually written the British government asking for help in reforming Guyana’s police force, but it has since turned out that after the British reportedly suggested one of their reform measures would require stationing British police officers among Guyana’s officers that the Jagdeo government recoiled under the guise of not being willing to compromise ‘national sovereignty.’
So, with all the missed opportunities for genuine police reforms, and the government allowing the police to become the law instead of enforcing the law, we now have a situation where corrupt practices have reached unprecedented levels as the unreformed police force, still affected by financial and political corruption, cannot make arrests of corrupt officials.
And as if to compound the already fatally toxic mixture of politics and crime, we are now learning the government is actually using active members of the Joint Services to carry out espionage activities, and paying them from an account being held in the Office of the President. This is a recipe for the formation of a police state and it is dangerous at all levels to our concept of democracy.
Today, as I reflect on all the foregoing and then I pivot to the words of the President that his government and the police “could have taken care of Fineman and Buxton sooner,” had it not been for the agendas of certain senior police officers, the only conclusion I can come to is that either the President is in deep denial or he has not gotten the memo that says his government, not the police force, is to be blamed for not doing its job in ensuring the force was overhauled since 1992.
Yours faithfully,
Emile Mervin
