Following the spate of armed robberies that occurred in the city last week the top brass of the Guyana Police Force tried once again to put a brave face on its limitations. It did not work. Both the Home Affairs Minister and the top brass of the Force are aware that a point has long been reached where public confidence in its capacity to serve and protect has been seriously eroded. Engagements with the media such as the one it held last week will not restore that public confidence.
A few things about the Force’s press conference after the events of last Monday stood out. The first of these was the announcement by Acting Police Commissioner Leroy Brumell that the Force was adjusting its strategy in order to enhance its capacity to effectively tackle crime. To tell the truth while we can hardly expect the Force to simply trot out all of the details of its law-enforcement strategy to the public, what in some instances passes for policing leaves us to wonder about the existence or otherwise of what the Commissioner calls a “strategy.”
Then there was the hope expressed by Crime Chief Seelall Persaud that the Force might, in the future, benefit from real time access to the state-run CCTV infrastructure which, according to the Crime Chief can only be accessed by way of application to the Office of the President. A subsequent response to what the Crime Chief had to say by Cabinet Secretary Dr Roger Luncheon suggests that the Crime Chief may well have spoken out of turn, since Dr Luncheon at a subsequent media briefing was certainly anxious not to allow the view to become embedded in the collective public mind that the Office of the President was running some kind of a Kafkaesque information-gathering system to which even the police had no automatic right of access.
All of this, of course, makes the image of the Force look even shabbier and begs the question as to whether the call by the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) last week for the police to put a clear plan on the table for the protection of the business sector is not one of the issues that the Force should be focusing on. That raises other bigger headaches for the police, not least of which is the issue of whether providing effective protection for the business community – or for any other section of the society, for that matter – can be contemplated in isolation from the vexed question of police reform.
It appears that implicit in the prevailing policing posture is the view that bricks can be made out of straw, that is, that effective policing can be derived from a condition in which the Force continues to function in exactly the manner that it does. Both the political powers that be and the leadership of the Force itself continue to have their heads buried firmly in the sand, studiously ignoring the reality that real and meaningful police reform is central to significantly improving the Force’s crime-fighting capacity.
Here, two points should be made. First, crime, in all of its both sophisticated and brutal manifestations, has evolved at a much faster rate than the capacity of the police to keep pace with it. Secondly, the police have had to deal with other serious handicaps of which securing both the number and the quality of recruits that it needs and reining in internal corruption are but two.
So that there is really no escaping the reality of the need for wide-ranging police reform, the sort of reform which, apart from delivering a Police Force with the organizational, physical and material capabilities to effectively counter the criminal muscle, evokes a robust sense of public confidence which, over time and for reasons that have to do largely with the manner in which the Force has conducted itself, has been eroded. Until both the strengths and the virtues that have been lost over time are restored, talk of effective “strategies” to counter crime ‒ whether it be attacks that target the business community or the citizenry as a whole ‒ is unlikely to evoke any meaningful measure of public confidence. It would be like whistling in the wind.