On January 3rd this year, the Minister of Home Affairs, Mr Clement Rohee delivered a progress report on a series of new plans he had unveiled on the last day of 2012 to rein in crime.
While a year may be too short a period to substantially achieve goals, particularly in a difficult area like law enforcement, Minister Rohee’s plans have produced results that have gone in the opposite direction. There has also been stagnation in some areas and questionable decisions in others.
While the trend for all of 2013 prior to the Minister’s presentation on January 3rd had shown that serious crime was going up notwithstanding the raft of new measures that had been unveiled, the end-of-year figures from the police underlined how unacceptable the situation was. The police on Thursday said that serious crimes had gone up in 2013 by seven percent. Murders had risen by 11% to 154 from 139. As a sign of how difficult the police force has found solving and detecting motives for crimes, 41 of these murders could not even be categorized by the police. Armed robbery was up by 7%.
With results like these after such sweeping plans, the Minister should have made an effort to defend this poor performance. He had nothing to say about this.
After the Jagdeo administration cynically forced the cancellation of UK funding for a comprehensive reform of the police force in 2009, Minister Rohee’s government nevertheless sought help in 2012 from a UK firm to guide some reforms and more recently from a US group to design and train a SWAT team. Yet, even these two ventures will not produce the results that Minister Rohee should have been delivering to the public earlier this month.
As has been argued repeatedly in these columns and elsewhere, Minister Rohee and his government are trifling with the police force when what it really needs is a complete restructuring from top to bottom, the injection of new blood, heightened emoluments and zero tolerance of corruption. Until these steps are put in place, Minister Rohee and his government are wasting taxpayers’ money and fooling the public.
The UK firm Capita Symonds – a principal of which had advised late, former Commissioner of Police Laurie Lewis long ago to implement intelligence-led policing is currently engaged in four areas which will not leave the criminals quaking in their boots. These are Administration, Succession Planning, Introducing a Code of Conduct and Developing Specialist Office of Professional Responsibility Teams and establishing a Modern Public Relations and Communications Department. If after 21 years of unbroken PPP/C governance these four areas have not yet been addressed then the government must own up to unparalleled failure and negligence in this portfolio.
It defies logic that Minister Rohee and his government fail to accept that the public has little to no confidence in the force and unless there are sweeping changes in personnel and the introduction of experts from outside the force in day-to-day operations there will be no reversal of the situation. Capita Symonds will undoubtedly be pleased to collect a pay cheque at the end of its assignment. The Guyanese public? They will undoubtedly be left to rue bad decisions.
Minister Rohee and his backers in the private sector had also played up the concept of civilian oversight of the force and implementation of reform plans. This could have no doubt been useful in creating an interface between the public and the police force on security. Unfortunately, there is no such platform for the public. The Strategic Management Department as it was named was hobbled from the start by poor selections which immediately reduced its credibility. In the year since it has been in existence it has not created a channel with the public through which confidence building can occur.
Nevertheless Minister Rohee presented a series of tasks of dubious value that have been accomplished by the Department including the conduct of an analysis aimed at “getting clearer insights into the internal and external factors that can impact on the modernization process and the development of a Change Management Strategy which is intended to catalyze the transformation process”. The description of its tasks was also riddled with the woolly language beloved of the modern-day management gurus, to wit “the development of a communications strategy so as to ensure that knowledge and awareness of the modernization process facilitate concomitant changes in behavior in the Force”.
The US outfit, The Emergence Group is now piloting what is a $163m contract for a SWAT team. Experts in policing have already said such a unit is a waste of time and at the price tag it is coming with, the money could have been better employed elsewhere. Further, the law enforcers who will be part of the team will no doubt be weakened by the same problems that permeate all sections of the force. There will be an ever-present risk of members of this squad going rogue as has been a longstanding problem with other specialist units in the police force.
The weaknesses of these initiatives aside, the year was rife with unfathomable examples of police failures. No more so in the case of the Derrick Khanai’s mass shooting where not only operationally was the force found woefully lacking but a man who should not have been allowed anywhere near to a gun was licensed by none other than a now deceased police commissioner.
There were several cases where the use of deadly force by the police could not be properly justified and other cases which could come under scrutiny because of their extrajudicial nature. The series of measures announced by Minister Rohee on the eve of 2013 did not seem to have a positive impact on the conduct of the police.
In terms of investigative capacity, the police were signally unable to solve high profile murders particularly those that had the hallmarks of contract killings. Nothing in the last year or so has transmitted to the public that the force’s investigative capacity has been heightened either through training or the developing of intelligence assets on the ground.
The incompetence of the police was recently on full display in two separate incidents at the Georgetown Hospital where in one case a policeman opened up fire in the hospital at a fleeing prisoner and another just a few days ago where a policeman died after another prisoner escaped from custody at the hospital.
None of the various mechanisms that are supposed to provide an anonymous outlet for tips from the public have produced charges and prosecutions. Positive change in law enforcement will remain elusive as long as Mr Rohee and his government pursue only cosmetic changes to policing.
