Now that President Ramotar has said that he supports an independent probe into the Colwyn Harding baton rape allegation, will his pronouncement necessarily lead to a swift, fair and transparent enquiry that will put to rest the issue and ensure that justice prevails?
A second no less pertinent question has to do with whether it might have been better for all concerned had a pronouncement on the desirability of an independent probe been made much earlier ‒ and not even necessarily by the President. Had that been done our feet may well have long been set on a path to determining exactly what happened to Mr Harding. Indeed, we might even have been spared the outpouring of some of the public protest and anger and the attendant energetic media reporting, and perhaps the Guyana Police Force (GPF) itself might have escaped the most recent outbursts of public opprobrium which it has had to endure on account of the dithering over who might have done what to Mr Harding.
As an aside the to-ing and fro-ing in the Harding case is characteristic of an ongoing meltdown in the quality of the politics that we practise. In virtually every case of a national challenge, resolving to work together to find the best possible solutions is superseded by the spewing of worthless and unhelpful invective. Increasingly, the contemporary practice of politics would appear to have less to do with serving the people and more to do with serving the interests of those who purport to lead. The quality of the political exchanges has come to resemble those tedious undercards that precede main bouts in boxing matches which provoke the boos and jeers usually associated with the boredom of the spectators.
Was the objective of all of the hype and hoopla and media reporting on the Harding case not designed to wrest a concession from the administration that an independent enquiry was warranted and would not such a concession, made much earlier, have averted at least some of the intervening public protestation? The political administration will probably not be disposed to responding to that question. An honest answer would take it much too close to stumbling upon the error of its ways.
Nowhere was the ineptitude of officialdom more glaring than in the pronouncement by the Commissioner of Police that the fingered policemen had denied the allegation. Surely Mr Brumell could not have seriously thought that a mere denial of the allegation by the fingered policemen would have been anywhere near enough to quell public outrage against a deeply distrusted Force. On the contrary, what the Commissioner had to say had the predictable effect of generating even more public protest, a circumstance which he would now do well to use as a barometer of just how much people distrust the police and how hard the latter need to work to regain that trust.
Interestingly it was only after the Commissioner’s ill-advised comment about the professed innocence of the fingered ranks had further inflamed the situation that the President weighed in with the remark that he had no objection to a public inquiry. At that point the President himself must have come to the realization that the manner in which the matter was being handled was making things worse, not better.
Particularly disturbing is the fact that the Commissioner appeared to be blissfully unaware of the fact that what he said was precisely the wrong thing to say. Might it not have been far more worthwhile for the Commissioner, at that particular juncture, to voice his own preference for an independent enquiry to clear the names of his ranks rather than to ask us to take their word for it?
It is by no means to the credit of either the police or the political administration that it took the holder of the highest office in the land to pronounce on the desirability of an independent probe into the Colwyn Harding case. At least in so doing the President was taking the pragmatic position that nothing short of such a course of action would exonerate the police. The other issue worth raising at this juncture has to do with what is widely believed to be the requirement that the Force awaits the requisite political directive before it acts on investigations in cases – like the Colwyn Harding matter – that might have the potential for political embarrassment.
It all comes back to the issue of the image of the Force and whether the media ought not to risk annoying officialdom even more by persisting in its reporting on the issue of whether the operational pursuits of the Force are completely free of political pressures.
That effective policing is being impeded by a lack of public trust in the Force and that there have been numerous occurrences that justify that lack of trust are not matters to be taken lightly. It is not just that – on the one hand – bad police/public relations hampers policing, per se, but also that the quality of the relationship creates a credibility gap for the police which it cannot overcome simply by pretending that that gap does not exist. That unfortunate but by no means unjustified public disposition of deep scepticism regarding the credibility of the police made the earlier pronouncement by the Commissioner of Police that the fingered policemen had declared their innocence ill advised. Indeed, from the standpoint of the police it made matters worse.
Two other points should be made about what President Ramotar had to say last weekend. First, we share his view regarding the desirability of affording accused persons a trial before “hanging” them. All too often, however, one gets the impression that the powers that be do not favour such “trials” so that people have come to feel that those “trials” can only be wrested from the authorities following robust agitation. In other words, if we could be assured that those trials would happen and they would be transparent and above board then the President would have nothing to worry about in that particular regard.
As for the matter of the President’s fretfulness over media reporting on the Colwyn Harding case the real problem here is that since the state media cannot be relied upon to report objectively on those issues where accurate reporting might compromise the administration’s image, the independent media must undertake that responsibility as part of their commitment to media freedom.
