Last week’s Ministry of Home Affairs statement in the matter of the role of the police in the investigation into the November 2012 death of a young man named Sadeek Juman is deserving of public comment if only because the content of the missive ventures beyond the type of official admonition of the performance of the Force to which we have grown accustomed.
The Ministry’s release had about it an unaccustomed bluntness, an unambiguous directness and an absence of the sorts of euphemisms customarily employed in official statements to lend restraint to intended harshness. While the statement was issued in the name of the Ministry of Home Affairs, in style as much as in content, it appeared to reflect the personal mood of Minister Clement Rohee who has been known to make his feelings on some issues known without bothering too much with window-dressing language.
Indeed, last week’s statement from the Home Affairs Ministry might even raise the question as to whether Mr. Rohee and the political administration that he serves may, perhaps, be signalling their readiness to embrace comprehensive remedial action within a Police Force that continues to demonstrate serious shortcomings in pursuit of its mission of “service and protection” or whether this is simply one of those vacuous outbursts triggered perhaps by such temporary pressure as Mr. Rohee might well be feeling at this time, arising out of the tirade of public admonitions – to say nothing of the string of embarrassing situations – which the Force has had to face in recent weeks.
The release itself – as was mentioned earlier, was triggered by the police investigation into the death of Sideek Juman. Specifically, it has to do with the fact that the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Shalimar Ali-Hack has twice taken swipes at what she appears to regard as evidence of a lack of thoroughness, indeed, sloppiness in the police investigation into Mr. Juman’s death. Not once, but twice, according to reports, the DPP demanded that the police redouble their investigative efforts in the matter of the death of Mr. Juman.
It appears too, that the Ministry of Home Affairs may have learnt of the second rejection by the DPP of the Force’s investigative efforts only after it had written to the Acting Commissioner of Police enquiring into such progress as was being made following the DPP’s first directive. Here, the question arises as to whether the quality of communication between the Office of the Commissioner of Police and the subject Ministry is as effective as it ought to be.
That, however, is what one might call ‘an aside’ in this matter since, in our view, the real issue has to do with the nature and seeming severity of the reprimand. We certainly doubt that any functionary below the level of the Minister of Home Affairs would have charged the police with “incompetence and apathy.” Such language would have had to be ‘cleared’ with Mr. Rohee himself who, at that stage, would have had good reason to be upset having met with the dead man’s mother in April – and presumably sought to provide her with assurances that the police were going about their work diligently. It transpires – at least so it seems – that he was to discover just over a week ago that that was far from the case.
Not content, it seems, to attach the inadequacies of “incompetence and apathy” to “the investigative ranks within the criminal investigative unit in Guyana,” the release proceeds – at least so it seems – to take a tilt at the Force itself, asserting that the Juman case was “symptomatic of an organization (the Guyana Police Force) that does not seem to appreciate that failure to resolve serious crimes swiftly comprehensively and efficiently paints the Guyana Police Force in a negative light.”
Again, we doubt very much that any media minder or public relations functionary would have opted for such strident language to remonstrate with the Guyana Police Force in the absence of which veto would likely have had to come from the Home Affairs Minister.
These are by no means the brightest days of Minister Rohee’s ministerial career. Indeed, having only just put both the Linden shootings and a choppy parliamentary period behind him Mr. Rohee has had to face more public and political criticism of his capacity to manage the Home Affairs portfolio.
Mr. Rohee would doubtless be aware of a letter sent to the Acting Police Commissioner by the DPP towards the end of February in which she cited cases of what she describes as an “unacceptable trend” in police investigative procedures which she said was “ultimately impacting on the effective functioning of the DPP’s office.” In the wake of the DPP’s letter Minister Rohee not only commented disparagingly on the number of serious crimes, including several murders but also publicly suggested that the Force lacked both the ability and the will to solve serious crimes.
One of the issues raised by the DPP in her February letter to the Acting Commissioner of Police was ‘the poor state of investigations” into serious crimes resulting in charges not being instituted, an admonition that came a matter of weeks before she directed that two men held over the April 27 murder of Police Corporal Romein Cleto – one of them having been charged – be released. That decision amounted to a standout humiliation for the Force and one which would have – in all likelihood – outraged the Minister.
That, as was mentioned earlier, leaves us with the issue of whether last week’s statement by the Home Affairs Ministry is indicative of Mr. Rohee’s readiness to embrace the kind of makeover for the force which only genuine police reform can bring and without which the Force will remain vulnerable to the kinds of criticisms that will drag it ever deeper into a state of disrepute. That, of course, is for Minister Rohee to decide though it would make every sense for his decision to take account of the harsh public judgment that has long been passed on the performance of the most important institution under his ministerial portfolio.
