The GPF and the alleged torturing of civilian suspects

Jun 10, 2010 Letters

Dear Editor,
I wish to add my voice to those of the populace who are immersed in the argument of alleged torture by the Guyana Police Force (GPF) and the United States Human Rights Report on Guyana.
The men and women of the GPF have come in for significant flak for a very long time now, whether it is police inaction, over zealousness in carrying out their duties or just plain discourteousness.
Not satisfied with those options another element has been added to the mix; that of police torture, the most prominent being the torture of the 14-year-old boy at the Leonora Police Station last year.
I, like many other Guyanese in and out of Guyana, was saddened that something of this nature could have occurred here, and I would like to condemn this heinous act that was perpetrated against the teenager by men in uniform that swore to uphold the law and protect the innocent.
However, one must not use a few bad apples as a basis of deductive reasoning when we seek to look at the whole GPF. As a people we tend to over-generalize things of this nature too often.
“When we look for patterns among the specific things we observe among us, we often assume that a few similar events are evidence of a general pattern.
Probably the tendency to over-generalize is greatest when the pressure to arrive at a general understanding is high.”
That is an excerpt from the text ‘The Practice of Social Research’ Seventh Edition when addressing Errors in Personal Human Inquiry.
The officers that perpetrated this dastardly act on the teen are being dealt with in the courts, and I have every confidence that they will feel the full extent of the law. Other cases of what could be termed “overzealousness”, or if one is prone to being harsh, “police brutality”, is a common phenomenon in any society and ought to be stamped out, as the powers that be in the GPF and the Home Affairs Ministry are seeking to do.
However we must not allow ourselves to give in to selective observation as a nation, but alas this is already the case, as observed in recent months.
Those who choose to stir up as much trouble as possible in the country, have concluded that a pattern of torture exists in Guyana and are paying more and more attention to those incidents and patterns that correspond with this pattern and ignoring those that do not.
They have effectively sought to point out every single instance of where the police have been overzealous in carrying out their duties and branded these instances as “torture”.
I imagine it will denigrate so far that if an officer of the law handcuff a suspect too tightly, he can run to these individuals and other public outlets and claim that he/she was tortured.
Anna Goodridge

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The GPF and the alleged torturing of civilian suspects

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