Dear Editor,
The Cabinet of Thursday 6 June 2024 has taken the proverbial wind out of the sails of a potentially brewing contretemps, by taking immediate steps to issue a directive to the Police and Health Services (I always thought the Immigration Department was part of the GPF, if only for the simple reason that the Commissioner of Police, by Statute, is the Chief Immigration Officer). This is with regard to the descriptors to be used when information is being collected about the citizenry – in the case of the Police, those accused of or alleged to have committed an offence. Hence, no need to inform CARICOM, the OAS, the OACPS, the AU, the IACHR, the UNHRC and otherwise internationalise this issue, when all is apparently now calm in the proverbial teacup.
However I do not think it is fair for my colleague, described by News Source as “prominent Attorney, Nigel Hughes, and a number of Afro-Guyanese Rights Organisations” to steal all of the available thunder (and “brownie” points, hoping that this descriptor itself is not politically incorrect!) for having “launched a national conversation last week on the use of the word “negro” by the Guyana Police Force…”. Indeed I am reliably informed that this matter was raised without fanfare some years ago by the GPA with the then Commissioner of Police, and an internal administrative directive was issued to take the necessary corrective action, without the need to distract either the Cabinet of this nation, or the ERC, from their otherwise busy agendas. That directive, to all reasonable appearances, may have been subsequently walked back, superseded, or otherwise put in abeyance…
For my part, I had written more than a year ago in this newspaper in April 2023, as follows:
‘As an aside, let me call out the Guyana Police Force for still insisting that, in this the 21st century, per their “protocols’’, someone making a report at a station is obliged to state their race! Granted that in cases of giving a description of a missing person or a suspect, such information may be relevant, but apart from the name, address and contact information of the person making the report, their race, and even their age is of absolutely no consequence to the arrest and/or eventual prosecution of an offender, save and except in cases of say, the rape of a minor’.
Just as how it is infra dig for pejorative racial terms to be used by the Police Services to describe members of the public who are being investigated, so too I believe it is wholly inappropriate and unnecessary for such descriptors to be applied to or asked of somebody making a police report or, even in most circumstances, the complainant, due regard being made for exceptions of the type referred to above.
Hence a distinction ought to be made between relevant information pertaining to an accused or alleged offender on the one hand, and information about the person filing a police report on the other. I trust that it would not also be necessary for the business of Cabinet to be disturbed in order for this inappropriate and unnecessary practice that is currently used by the Police when someone is making a report to cease, and that the Police Administration could take the initiative on its own, by logically extrapolating on the Cabinet decision issued last Thursday.
Yours faithfully,
Neville J. Bissember
