Police Needs

Sep 02, 2012 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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The Commission of Inquiry into the police shootings at Linden will soon begin its work. I wonder if the Disciplined Forces Commission (DFC) Report, submitted to Parliament in 2004 and approved in 2010, had been implemented, that we’d have needed such an Inquiry. The authorities consistently assert that aspects of the report have been operationalised, pointing to massive increases in the GPF’s budget.
The question for us, the citizenry, however, is whether we have gotten the “bang for the buck” –pun intended – with all this spending. Even the most fervent supporter of the Police will have to concede that we have not. Our murder rate keeps rising even as the rate of solving murders keeps plummeting. Armed robberies have become increasingly brazen and daring – and frequent.
But all of this is not new: Police performance had plummeted since the Force was politically compromised in the 1970’s when the rot had set in so deeply that senior officers had to swear personal fealty to the PNC top brass. All of this has been well documented in Professor Ken Danns book that came out of his PhD research that was so was well researched: “Domination and Power in Guyana”.
Of greater import to us is the question “why police performance has not improved noticeably after all the resources have been pumped into it in the last two decades?”
The police could reasonably respond that the nature of crime and criminality has changed drastically over that same era: drug trafficking, high intensity robberies and politically motivated violence etc. have all risen to new heights (or sunken to new lows). But has the Police reoriented or reorganised themselves – a la the DFC Report – to face these new threats? I don’t believe so.
What we have been emphasising is that our Police Force does not just need its “capabilities upgraded”; it needs a complete makeover in its composition, values and raison d’etre. To start with the last one, we can see that no matter what changes have been made up to now, the Police Force and its leadership still views its role as it was when it was founded in 1839, right after the abolition of slavery: as a “force” to pacify the newly-freed slaves.
This has to go! Its military-style and high-handed mode of operation within that population in the present has really turned off and even incensed the average man in the street – even some of its erstwhile supporters. The GPF needs to be redefined, retrained and redeployed as a police “service” rather than a police “force” for the citizens of Guyana. This will have to go far beyond a mere name change.
Secondly, the composition of the force has to change to reflect the general population. At the start the British brought in Barbadians to ensure they would take on the local ex-slaves. When the locals showed they were not a threat, they were recruited to keep down the new ‘threats”: Indian indentureds with cutlasses on the sugar plantation. This “divide and rule” policy was maintained by the PNC after independence because it served their purpose. But this foundational policy not only created an Indian security dilemma but eroded the legitimacy of an institution of the state that more than any other needs to be affirmed by all the citizenry.
Thirdly, the service needs to be radically decentralised. In the end, all good policing is local policing. Practically every police organisation in the world – apart from those in totalitarian states – are decentralised. The nexus between centralisation and totalitarianism is not coincidental. The colonial state was essentially a totalitarian one as far as its drive to control the actions and thoughts of the captive population. Our Force was explicitly modelled on the one England established to pacify the Irish rather than their decentralised one for the English. We have to decentralise radically and immediately.
It is not only in biology that form to a large extent dictates function: the truism also holds for organisations. The centralised form of the Force encourages a very hierarchical and authoritarian mindset, not only in the upper echelons but also even among the rank and file. Such a mindset is totally unsuitable for dealing with a civilian population. The decentralisation we envisage would see the creation of several police forces for the country based on population and geographical considerations. The decentralisation would rest on a base of Neighbourhood Policing. Then in an internal decentralisation, the Force needs to farm out all those tasks that can be handled by civilians.
To deal with the “new-age” crimes of drug trafficking, high intensity crimes and money laundering etc, the creation of specialised units of the Force is demanded. Where is the intelligence unit that is key to breaking drug rings? Where is long-promised Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) unit.  Let’s quit blaming the police and start reforming the GPF.

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