Dirty Harry

Oct 01, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Did you ever see the movie, “Magnum Force,” starring the evergreen actor, Clint Eastwood as a San Francisco policeman affectionately referred to as “Dirty Harry?” The moral of the story is a very old one. There is nothing new there but because of Eastwood’s portrayal of the cop, Harry Callahan, in the series, this particular one became famous and its underlying theme soaked into viewers’ mind.

A group of policemen went into exra-judicial overdrive and murdered people that the courts freed but who the policemen believed were criminals who walked and therefore should be punished.

The inherent danger with extra-judicial authority is that lines will inevitably be crossed and complications will arise. Logic will go out the window and boundaries become blurred as to who is an enemy and who is a friend.

Harry Callahan began to sense that his colleagues were murdering ex-criminals. As more evidence poured in, Callahan was suspected by the extra-judicial cabal of having knowledge of their illegal escapades.

Harry was approached and asked to join. These was Harry’s final words before contemptuously rejecting their offer; “You can’t go killing people like that; the next thing you know you will shoot a man if he pisses on your lawn.”

Harry was now targeted for death. The extra-judicial line was crossed. The finest cop in San Francisco was to be killed by his own colleagues.

One by one, Callahan killed them as they pursued their conspiracies to murder him. The last confrontation took place on the wharf where a motorcycle chase saw the final rogue cop losing his life because of inexperience.

Callahan knew that with that speed, you would have run into the ocean, so he jumped off his cycle as he approached the edge. His pursuer didn’t understand that and he went full throttle at the bottom of the ocean. As Callahan watched him drown, he said to himself; “You guys were amateurs.”

When you are an amateur don’t get into extra-judicial violence. An amateur in Guyana did just that and spoke to a killer on his own cell phone. He ended up being investigated by a Commission of Inquiry.

The dangerous story of extra-judicial mayhem is a very popular topic for crime novels and screen-play writers. The latest movie on this theme is “A Righteous Kill” starring two top guns, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. A detective kills people that he thinks are bad. When one of his own suspects him, he moves to kill her.

The moral of extra-judicial adventures by governments and their employees is that they always bring ruin.

So we have in Guyana, a press conference called by Minister Leslie Ramsammy and he asked the media about their non pursuit of the contents revealed in a disclosed, taped conversation between then Commissioner of Police, Winston Felix and Member of Parliament, Basil Williams.

When the tape hit the streets, this writer commented on it. In that column, I wrote that I didn’t find anything incriminating. I still hold to that view. But there can be no analogy between Dr Ramsammy’s alleged involvement with Roger Khan and the dialogue between Winston Felix and Basil Williams.

Let’s advance our argument. Williams enquired if firearms will be allowed into the Stadium during World Cup Cricket activities.

Felix said no. Then the two men discussed a mass killing in Agricola in which Felix offered his opinion as to who did it and he felt he should shape his public statements on the violent orgy for purposes that suited him, the Commissioner.

None of the men on the tape committed any act using state resources.

One of the men, Basil Williams, had no governmental authority. In the case of Felix, no action came from him as a state official and he ordered no illegal action.

Dr Ramsammy’s tale is completely different. Three witnesses accused him of facilitating a confessed drug baron of a murderous scheme of assassination and drug trafficking in cocaine. There is a letter that is said to have belonged to Dr Ramsammy in which he used his role as Minister of Government to import sensitive technological equipment to help this drug baron and stated on the document that his Government concurred.

In other words, if you believe the accusations against Leslie Ramsammy, he was involved in deep extra-judicial waters in which drugs, criminality, assassination and policy-making met in a violent confluence.

There can be no comparison between unbecoming speeches of a Police Commissioner and that of a Minister of Government in which ugly violence was encouraged in a vortex of extra-judicial madness.

Harry Callahan was right; some people are amateurs.

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Dirty Harry

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