Why waste resources on deportee monitoring?

Oct 24, 2010 News

– domestic criminals are creating more problems

While Guyana, like some of its CARICOM counterparts, maintains a policy of monitoring criminal deportees, there is emerging evidence that the forced re-migrants’ involvement in criminal activities is declining.
Local police officials, while not entirely in favour of scrapping the initiative of monitoring deportees, believe that the focus should shift to domestically bred criminals.

Are high profile criminal suspects like Tyrone Rowe called COBRA, shown here with media operatives shortly before his surrender, being properly monitored?

Local intelligence, according to a top official of the Criminal Investigations Department, is pointing to less and less deportees remaining in Guyana.
There was a period when almost every carjacking involved deported elements and domestic criminals soon took up the mantle.
Then there were the brazen robberies and execution-style killings, for which many believe deportees were central figures.
According to a senior CID operative, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, most deportees were sent back to Guyana on drug related charges.
This, he said, is why most of them soon link up with the local drug dealers since their knowledge of the overseas markets and connections is sometimes invaluable.
Of course, this leads to the drug culture of execution-style killings which are so prevalent in the major drug consuming countries, being imported wholesale into Guyana.
And this underscores the need for stricter monitoring of these individuals who by the nature of their status are hard pressed to find decent jobs here.
The Criminal Investigations Department Headquarters at Eve Leary is responsible for the monitoring of deportees.
How this is done, though, is anyone’s guess since the deportees are spread all over Guyana.
Previously, there was a special Deportee Monitoring Unit, which would from time to time check on these persons at the local addresses they provided to the CID.
However, according a former member of that unit, out of every 10 deportees, they were lucky to locate one.
“They used to have to report to the police, but some smart lawyer probably advised that they were not legally obligated to do so. So they stopped reporting to the police,” the former Deportee Monitoring Unit member explained.
Unconfirmed estimates put it at 10 per cent deportee involvement in crime generally. This is narrowed down to five percent deportee involvement in serious crimes such as murders and armed robbery.
“When you hear about a gang, at least one of them is a deportee. The rest of the deportees are either junkies, while some are involved in petty drug dealing. Maybe two percent of them are doing something decent, and these are the ones who are getting help from relatives who are well off,” the senior CID source pointed out.
Acting Crime Chief, Winston Cosbert, declined to comment on the deportee issue, but he did venture to say that not every crime that a deportee commits is highlighted.
But is it the deportees who are responsible for the current rate of crime in Guyana? Most local police officials do not believe this to be the case. They are of the view that the domestic bred criminals are the ones who are causing the most problems.
It is for this reason that police officials are upset when certain criminal elements get bail soon after they are charged with high profile crimes.
For them, keeping these criminals incarcerated is the easiest way of ‘monitoring’ them.
“We do have a policy in which correspondence is sent out to Divisional Commanders whenever a high profile criminal is being released. This helps, and we try to monitor them but we need more intelligence personnel. More often than not, these same individuals are rearrested at some later stage,” one source explained.
But from all appearances, the monitoring of domestic criminals is lagging behind.
A few weeks ago the police claimed to have intelligence on a gang war stemming from a local drug operation which may have led to the execution of five persons in the Cummings Lodge area.
At least two more execution style killings occurred after that and the shells recovered linked the two scenes and there is the suspicion that they could be linked to the Cummings Lodge killings.
“These gangs were not being monitored because if they were, these executions could have been prevented. Our intelligence system is failing,” a senior police officer admitted.