Police Commissioner Leslie James says that an investigation has been launched into the suicide by a rape accused while he was in police custody at the Whim Police Station lockups.
The man, accused of raping and impregnating a young relative, was found hanging from his cell bars on Sunday November 3rd 2019, having been arrested on Saturday November 2nd 2019.
The occurrence raises the question as to the effectiveness of the systems which the police and prisons use to treat with suicidal inmates, especially in light of past incidences of suicides by inmates.
Speaking to Stabroek News today, however, Director of Prisons, Gladwin Samuels pointed out that the GPS has indeed implemented Special Operating Procedures (SOPs), which has resulted in no such incidence occurring for some time.
Such SOPs, he explained, are triggered after a person is processed and put though the court, having clearly exhibited self-harm or suicidal tendencies, or following a psychological evaluation which reveals these risks.
Samuels said that when the GPS confirms, via a psychological evaluation, or the exhibition of signs, that a person poses a risk to himself/herself, that person is placed on suicide watch, where his access to the usual instruments which he can use to self-harm is restricted. He stressed that the GPS takes precautions against the known implements of self-harm, and instruments which can be used in the commission against suicide, even as he lamented that Guyanese have continued to find innovate ways to commits suicide in detained.
Samuels added that officers on duty are also given specific time intervals at which they must check on person subjected to this system.
The inefficiency of these SOPs, or a lapse in their implementation in 2018, resulted in the death of Shameer Khan, 53, of 111 Miles Mahdia, Region 8, who was found dangling in a cell where he was being detained. He had committed suicide. Stabroek News had reported that Khan was arrested and charged for simple larceny, and fined $40,000, failing to pay which, he would spend eighteen months in prison. The man was placed in custody as he could not pay the fine. This death is said to have prompted an investigation into a possible breach of the SOPs concerning possibly suicidal inmates.
The current case of suicide, however Samuels said, is not an indictment against the SOPs, or their implementation, but reveals the difficulty which exists in treating with persons before they are processed.
Samuels says that there are no SOPs for persons who have merely been arrested, and detained in the lockups, but not yet charged and processed through the court.
He shared that GPS ‘detection officers’ are trained to pick up on indicators which may suggest that a person may self-harm or is likely to commit suicide. If this happens, he said, the SOPs can be put in motion.
In the absence of such express behaviour, he said, there is no way for officers of the GPS to know whether a person who has been arrested is likely to self-harm or commit suicide.
In 2018, the Stabroek News had reported that a resident of the Mocha Housing Scheme, East Bank Demerara committed suicide by ingesting a carbon tablet while being held at the East Ruimveldt Outpost. The man was being held in custody for allegedly raping a child, and it was unclear how he obtained the substance while in detention.
An autopsy of the man’s body could not verify, however, whether he died as a result of ingesting the poison.
