A professional Police Force can only be said to be discharging its responsibilities when it is perceived by the citizenry, as a whole, to be functioning in a manner that is even-handed, without prejudice, unshackled by the taint of corruption and perhaps above everything else, when it is free of the restraints of political direction. Where some or all of these criteria are absent a Police Force is falling short in the discharge of its duties. Particularly, when law-enforcement appears disposed to actions that are believed to be driven by prejudice of a political kind, the citizenry as a whole cannot be blamed for not trusting the Police Force.
All of the aforementioned infirmities are believed to afflict the Guyana Police Force, to varying degrees. Some of them, it is believed, are now sufficiently embedded as to seriously interfere with the Force’s ability to effectively tackle some of the critical assignments that lie at the core of its responsibilities. Setting everything else aside, for the moment, it has to be said that the relentless and unceasing public shakedowns of traffic offenders perpetrated by police ranks which commonly occur, in some instances literally on the doorsteps of Police Stations have assumed proportions of obscenity that have brought the Force to a place of unquestionable humiliation.
There can, however, be no greater threat to the integrity of the Guyana Police Force than its seeming long-standing malleability to political directives. No other shortcoming or vulnerability does more to rubbish the Force’s service and protection mantra; which is precisely why the routinized ritual of the Head of State’s high-sounding exhortations at the Annual Police Officers’ Conference appear to vanish like butter ‘gainst the sun’ no sooner than those gatherings are dispersed. Here, the general understanding that exists amongst the assembled officers is that much of what the President has to say is intended for decorative effect.
Political and public noises over the appointment of a Police Commissioner (acting or substantive) is nothing new. These surface, to different degrees, on every occasion that the position becomes vacant or is due to become vacant. At those junctures there occur outbreaks of brisk public chatter as to who should head the Force, the discourses usually revolving around the themes of seniority, suitability and above everything else, political preference.
These same issues surfaced in the instance of Mr. Clifton Hicken, who has now been appointed to act as Commissioner but whose appointment has triggered voluminous public responses that are largely political in nature. Months before the appointment was announced Mr. Hicken had been ‘decorated’ with the label of the political administration’s ‘man’ and it was the politics of his preferment much more than the issue of either supersession or competence that had dominated the public space. It is, as well, in this very context that the People’s National Congress/Reform’s legal challenge to Mr. Hicken’s appointment has to be seen.
Whatever the outcome of the proceedings that are now enjoined in the matter of Mr. Hicken’s appointment to act as ‘Top Cop,’ they fit into that familiar pattern of the political cat-sparring to which we have become accustomed and which, more pointedly, not only reinforces public perception of the Guyana Police Force as a prisoner of politics but seriously hobbles its ability to do anything even remotely resembling justice to its motto of Service and Protection.
There are much deeper, more undeniably serious consequences that derive from the unending political conundrum in which the Force finds itself. Evidence of the underperformance of the Force in the execution of its duties and what is widely believed to be dimensions of embedded corruption that manifest itself in various ways are all reflections of a Police Force that now appears to dwell snugly in a mare’s nest, seemingly caught up in a ceaseless drift away from its over-arching duty to serve and to protect.
