When our protector turns against us

Jun 13, 2010 Features / Columnists, My Column

By Adam Harris

Bob Marley once sang, ‘Man to man is so unjust, children you don’t know who to trust’. But he was not the only one to reach that conclusion. So many people know that man is most cruel to his fellow man. For example, he has devised the most destructive weapons to deal with his fellow man.
The first time these weapons emerged, there was no thought about the animals in the wild, except perhaps for the Buffalo gun. Man made guns to kill his fellow man. He designed guns that could fire hundreds of rounds per minute although it would only take one bullet to kill a man. In fact, there are rules governing the size of weapons man can use to kill an animal. There is no such distinction for the kind of weapon he can use against his own kind.
The atomic bombs were never designed to deal with animals that far outnumber mankind. Neither were the submarines and aircraft carriers, all of which cost so much that Guyana could live happily for more than a year if it could get the money used to build one aircraft carrier.
Knowing that man to man is so unjust, man made laws and experimented on ways to put his fellow man to death. He used the broad axe and the sword to behead; he experimented with the noose until he got hanging to perfection; he experimented with a chair that passed thousands of volts into the body of man. Today he has what he calls a lethal injection. He is not happy to see the death throes of the man he wants to kill.
Society has come to recognize that there will always be the deviant, so it has the police for the maintenance and restoration of the norms of the society. However, the problem comes when the very people the society places to protect it actually become as deviant as the very people the police are asked to guard against.
There is the argument that the people who form the police come from the very society from which the criminals come. Some argue that they might have even come from the same home so they would have been exposed to the same influences.
My view is that once people are exposed to right and wrong, and are influenced by people who believe in right, then they should always make a judgement in favour of what is right. This is what now bothers me. I had just put the day’s newspaper to bed when I got a phone call instructing me to refrain from going to press.
I had sleep in my eyes but when the boss speaks one had better listen. Then I got another call informing me that a sergeant of police had been caught committing a robbery. That he had risen to the rank of sergeant suggested that he had done a lot of good in the police force. He had qualified to lead lesser men.
This was a man who would have disciplined errant policemen, but here he was going with others and using a gun to steal cell phones and a silver chain. He was no different from the criminals he was supposed to protect the society from. He was one of them.
A colleague in the media asked me rhetorically, what would I expect if a sergeant is paid a salary that can barely put food on his table. My retort was that there are so many other things that a man can do to supplement his earnings and none of these would involve criminal activity.
A policeman is supposed to protect me. Indeed I have heard horror stories involving policemen. I have heard of policemen renting out their weapons to criminals.
There have also been reports of police patrols being in the vicinity of a robbery as if to provide cover for the criminals. This does not help the image and it bothers me.
I know that there was a time when people joining the police force all wanted to be traffic policemen because of the perks available from errant drivers. However, collecting money from people on the road pales into insignificance when one is confronted with robber cops.
I have not been able to talk to the junior ranks to get an idea of how they feel but I do expect that some of them would be embarrassed. The seniors are livid and members of the wider society are shocked.
Policemen are often reluctant to prosecute their own. I hope that this will not be the case this time around because the message to the rest of society would be horrible to say the least.

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