The Ministry of Home Affairs can bluster as much as it pleases; nothing demonstrated the shortcomings of the police more clearly than the events in Middle Street on Tuesday. It was not that they did not have the equipment to deal with the situation: they had enough weaponry; they certainly had access to enough protective gear had they needed it; they had metal barriers in stock to control the crowd, and presumably they also had loud hailers back at police HQ. They also had no shortage of manpower on the scene – although most of the officers should not have been in the line of fire; they had marksmen; and they had men who had been trained in negotiation in the United States to cater for situations such as these.
What they did not have was any plan of action, and former Commissioner Winston Felix has referred to the apparent absence of an incident post on site where the designated officer in charge from the beginning could keep senior officers off-site informed. As it was, the whole operation appeared directionless.
Mr Deryck Kanhai was not a bandit; he was a man possibly suffering from a mental illness of a psychotic nature, or drug psychosis or both. As such, therefore, it might very well have been necessary for the police to shoot him in the end, but one would have hoped that they would have made some effort to try and coax him out of the house first. In one report the police said they did try to negotiate, although whether they used a loud hailer or not or tried to speak to him on his cell phone – assuming he had one with him, of course – is not known. In any case, by that time there had been so much shooting it must have fed into Mr Kanhai’s paranoia, and perhaps negotiation would have been a futile exercise.
Be that as it may, in the public’s perception what seems to have happened is that different contingents of police arrived at different times, and there was no grip on the situation from the outset. This led to an appearance of total confusion with each new group coming in to shoot. It does not take a security expert like Mr Felix to tell us that the area should have been cleared and sealed off to the crowd first, and they should have been much further from the scene than they were. The barriers should have appeared with the first contingent of police (the cars were easy to block off, it was the pedestrians who presented the problem). All of the policemen who were not properly equipped for a live fire zone, should have been on crowd control, which as it turned out, was rather onerous.
Within the zone, clearly an assessment needed to be done in the first instance, which to all appearances was not; as said above, all the policemen who arrived treated it as a shooting situation. A security expert who wished to remain anonymous told Stabroek News the police did not need to hurry; they had time, even if they had to rotate ranks. A bit of patience would have allowed them to contact Mr Kanhai’s relatives – and his brother was easily available – to get some insights into the best psychological approach in dealing with the shooter; to find out whether he had a cell phone; and to get a detailed description of the geography of the house. With no attack in the first instance, who knows, Mr Kanhai might conceivably have calmed down a little.
What the situation did not need, was a succession of police officers, who did not know where to shoot because they could not work out where Mr Kanhai was firing from, and in the absence of that piece of critical information just used their firepower to assault the building, so to speak. In any event, it does not need a security expert to tell anyone that dealing with one man holed up in a house with three guns (none of them an assault rifle) does not necessitate the 70-80 police Stabroek News counted on the scene (Commissioner Brumell said it was fifty); the situation just requires a number of properly equipped sharp shooters, who should, according to Mr Felix, be found among the ranks of the TSU. If it becomes necessary to storm the house, as another security expert said, that could be done after dark.
Even with the best Standard Operating Procedures being followed, it is still always possible ‒ although infinitely less likely ‒ a police officer could have been killed or injured, but the two who tragically did lose their lives should not have done so in the circumstances they did ‒ and this is not in any way to denigrate their personal courage. Mr Felix also pointed to the absence of a plan to get the injured out of the area.
What this means is that the police have to go back to the drawing board, and so, incidentally, do the Ministry of Home Affairs and its Minister. The police should have rough blueprints for this kind of situation, and if necessary should rehearse it, so everyone knows in a general sense how the police response should go. Of course, each incident will have its own features, but there are some generalities which would cover many of them and are in any case fairly basic, such as cordoning off an area even before whoever is in command arrives on the scene to make an assessment. Who holds the responsibility to do the shooing if that becomes necessary, must also be very clear from the outset. The police surely do not need to be reminded that this played out not in some isolated spot on the Linden Highway, but in a highly built-up area with several schools not far away.
This newspaper has already editorialized on the matter of Mr Kanhai’s gun licence. Everyone is asking how on earth someone who was known to the police ‒ in the case of one incident where he shot himself in the jaw, he was found to be in possession of an unlicensed firearm ‒ could be given a licence. His brother did not know, but suggested that the man had high-level contacts. Whatever the case, there needs to be an immediate inquiry into how exactly Mr Kanhai acquired his gun licence, and the findings should be made public. At the very least it is a serious indictment of the system – if there is a system which functions transparently and according to the rules, which these events would suggest there isn’t.
As things stand, it is no secret that this administration has allowed the issuing of firearm licences with reckless abandon, and this country is awash with legal guns, never mind illegal ones. Given that, while we all hope that what happened on Tuesday is an isolated incident, there is no guarantee that it will be.
There is a different kind of lesson the police and the Minister of Home Affairs – and by extension the government – should draw from the situation, and that is to recognize the alienation of the citizenry from the police, particularly in Georgetown and the lower East Coast. All the reports noted the cheers from the crowd when Mr Kanhai fired at the ranks, while on the streets it was being said that when the police claimed three men had been killed in a shoot-out in October (a reference to the killings outside the K&VC hotel), they came out unscathed, but not this time when they faced just one man, and there were dozens of officers on the scene.
In other words, the population is not prepared to accept extra-judicial killings on the part of the GPF, and as long as they continue these there is no hope of rebuilding the relationship and securing the public’s co-operation. This, as is well known, has serious implications for effective police work.
The bottom line of the problem with the police force is simple: it has been systematically undermined by the politicians over the last twenty years, who have regarded it with suspicion because they see it through political lenses and as a potential tool for the PNC, among other things. There has been no interest in building up the GPF’s professionalism, therefore, because an efficient police force not directly answerable to the political powers-that-be makes the latter feel insecure. In addition, the corruption in the force has not been tackled, and a tolerance has been shown for ‘short-cut’ methods, such as extra-judicial killings. We are all paying the price of this, including members of the GPF themselves. Unless the politicians decide, therefore, that they want a truly professional policing body, it will be hard to raise the standards of the force overall, although for specific incidents such as the one on Tuesday, as indicated above, the response could be much upgraded.