Additional material resources allocated to the Guyana Police Force (GPF) ‒ including additional ranks, arms and ammunition, vehicles, computers and police stations – are unlikely to yield any commensurate improvement in the quality of policing unless, somehow, the allocation of those resources can be accompanied by a corresponding enhancement of the Force’s public image.
Whether the Force accepts this or not is quite a different matter. Over time, such image- enhancing measures as have been initiated by the Force have been counteracted by even more generous measures of indiscretion on its part. All too frequently, the Force is its own worst enemy.
Sometimes you get the impression that the Force has given up on its image, especially at those times when we experience protracted periods of bad policing including incidents that lead to accusations of police excesses, beatings, killings and not infrequently, torture.
In the instance of the current case of alleged torture facing the police, the Force’s shabby public image is its own worst enemy. In this case it really is a matter of whether the police can be taken at their word. The truth is that the widespread sense of public outrage that attends the current torture accusation is driven by what people believe is the proclivity of the police for such acts of lawlessness and the tendency of officialdom to protect the transgressors. It is a terrible dilemma in which the Force finds itself, but it surely cannot be said that the dilemma is not self-inflicted.
There can no longer be any denying the fact that the Force has its own fair share of functionaries whose agendas really have nothing to do with service and protection. Their interest, mostly, is in using the authority vested in them to engage in criminal acts that include the violation of the rights of citizens. For them good policing is about ‘results’ at any cost.
There are different reasons why some people distrust and dislike the police. There are the families of victims of police killings who remain bitter over the fact that those killings have not even had the benefit of transparent enquiries. That, surely, is the least that we can hope for in a society that lays claim to democratic values.
It is the same with the survivors of merciless beatings and those believed to have been victims of torture. It is no different with the elderly woman who told this newspaper just last week that she had become ill enough to have to seek medical attention after watching the victim of a police beating being tossed into the back of a wagon.
The problem does not stop at the behaviour of thugs who masquerade as policemen. All too often public demands that alleged police transgressions be transparently investigated are met with walls of silence, or else, with official responses that are ineptly conceived and obviously evasive. It is the same, time and again.
Two sets of consequences derive from this pattern of behaviour. First, public loathing for the police deepens. Simultaneously, the effectiveness of our policing declines further. The second and arguably far more disturbing consequence is the sense of institutional protection felt by the perpetrators of what, so often, are terrible wrongs and the licence which the protection grants them to continue to go around ‘playing God.’
No matter how challenging our crime situation becomes, the Force is not at liberty to set aside the practices and protocols that form part of good policing. As it happens far too many policemen do not embrace that axiom.