Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee is usually not inclined to allow critical public comment on any matter that falls under his portfolio to pass without weighing in with a view of his own. Invariably, his responses are sharp and combative, sometimes even inviting an escalation of the issue into a more prolonged public ‘discourse.’
One does not get the impression that Mr Rohee usually takes kindly to the sort of searching scrutiny to which the Guyana Police Force is sometimes subjected at the hands of both the press and the public. Whenever what are perceived as the Force’s shortcomings are placed in the public domain Mr Rohee quickly assumes that combative posture. Sometimes he goes as far as accusing the particular critic of not having its best interests at heart or worse, seeking to demoralize the Force.
It may well be that there are those who might have a vested interest in a demoralized Police Force, though it is more than a trifle far-fetched to seek to have us believe that every news story, every editorial and every public comment of a critical nature that is directed at the Force is, somehow, designed to inflict some heinous act of sabotage on the Force. Nor, for that matter, is it even remotely reasonable for the Home Affairs Minister to take the view that every critical observation – well-intentioned or otherwise – that is made about the performance of the Force warrants an exhaustive public discourse.
Again we state that it is not a matter of denying Mr Rohee the right to defend his portfolio but simply one of having him recognize that every criticism of the police does not carry with it some hidden agenda nor does that criticism necessarily reflect the grinding of a proverbial axe. That, it seems, is what the Minister would have us believe; so that from the very outset there is neither room nor context for seeking out such validity as may repose in what the critic has to say. Call it paranoia, closed-mindedness or whatever else you will, that is no way to manage the image of the GPF.
There have even been times when the Home Affairs Minister has caused it to appear as though he would prefer that the Force be protected by an impenetrable wall of silence or by some alternative mechanism that allows a strict gatekeeper approach to placing information about the Police Force in the public domain, and here it seems that Mr Rohee currently appears to be fighting the GPF’s own internal demons associated with confidentiality and the means by which information sometimes reaches the public domain. What, perhaps, he needs to begin to contemplate is whether the constraints that affect the operational efficiency of the Force’s own public information machinery may not have, in themselves, spawned the alternative methods of information dissemination about which he was bellyaching only recently. While it remains true that much of the work of the Force depends for its effectiveness on discretion and confidentiality, the notion that confidentiality can be interpreted to mean either the erection of a wall of silence or the filtering of information based on nothing more than the whims of some high official is unacceptable.
No one, not even the Minister, we believe, would be bold enough to suggest that the Force has been doing anywhere near a salutary job – and here we concede that the weaknesses of the police derive from limitations that have much to do with a lack of resources – and, that being the case, there exists all the more reason for the Force to remain under public scrutiny, not in a manner that seeks to demoralize or do damage to its morale, but in a manner that supports official efforts to improve the quality of law-enforcement. Nor can it be denied that revelations continue to unfold regarding crooked cops and corruption in the GPF, and sometimes one gets the impression that the powers that be would prefer that these occurrences simply go away. Indeed, we believe that the discomfort regarding disclosure so often demonstrated by high officials has everything to do with the fact that the media have a role in keeping these discomfitting issues, requiring answers and addressing what, for politicians, is often the discomfitting issue of instituting remedial action. Sometimes it is their own demons that they are fighting.
In the final analysis and taking full account of the central role of the Force in the maintenance of law and order, we are ill-advised to remove from the equation the role of the citizenry as stakeholders in the law-enforcement process. There are those whom – whatever else they may say publicly – perceive the police as lone rangers in the fight against crime. We discover, from time to time and sometimes at great cost that that, most assuredly, is not the case. The argument here is that that stakeholder role gives the public and the press the right to examine, probe, challenge and otherwise undertake evaluations of the performance of the Force. The Police Force’s maxim of ‘service and protection’ can only work effectively if it proceeds on the basis of an acceptance of the public’s stakeholder role in that process and on the corresponding right of the media to raise such legitimate concerns as might arise about the quality of law enforcement without being accused of being fifth columnists.
We doubt very much that any good would come of the Home Affairs Minister simply snapping at every critic of the GPF, battening down the hatches and – as it sometimes seems – regarding every criticism as an extension of some sinister plot to destroy the will of the Force to do its job efficiently. The Minister would do well to remember that not every aspect of the process of enforcing the law reposes in training and techniques that are beyond the competence of those of us who fall outside the substantive law-enforcement framework. That is an argument which he has used to question the right of the media to comment publicly on policing issues. It is not an argument that we accept. In fact, it is not a rational argument.
