For a Professional Police Force

Oct 07, 2012 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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Sometimes I feel like the protagonist of “Dune” who lived for 3000 years and saw it all. Sadly the only wisdom gained is the clichéd, “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”
Déjà vu can make one jaded. Mark Archer, a publicist for APNU is a “returned” Guyanese and former army officer who appears serious about change. He’s once again called for the “professionalization” of the GPF – but without once mentioning the 2000 constitutional insertion demanding a Commission to examine the need for an ethnically representative force. He ignored the Report of the Disciplined Forces Commission, submitted in 2004 and approved by parliament in 2010, which calls for such a change. It’s like reinventing the wheel and ignoring that it needs to be round.
I regurgitate some observations from the past. The scholar Cynthia Enloe, who focused on the phenomena of ethnic conflict in the 1970’s (she taught at UG for a while) wrote: “The resolution of inter-ethnic conflict demands that armies and police forces be examined not as neutral instruments that cope with problems, but as potential causes of the problems as well.”
I have always looked at the tribulations of our disciplined forces from this perspective. It is a political perspective. One can, of course, look at those forces (or any other phenomena) from any other number of angles but we have to ask ourselves, “What is our objective in conducting the examination.”
The objective of my analysis and comments is to confront our most fundamental structural problem and bring stability with justice in Guyana.
The elemental cause of our endemic conflict has been a political one based on the ethnic cleavages in our society. While each state institution will have to confront and deal with the area of national concern for which it was organized, we can never lose sight of the relation of the institution to the underlying political conflict. If we ignore this nexus we ignore the primeval stance in which these institutions are viewed by the citizenry at large: State institutions are, by definition, institutions through which the power of the state is exercised, and are flashpoints for social struggle.
Enloe went on to state, “Any lasting resolution of ethnic conflict may require that the distribution of political authority and influence in the society be basically reordered and that, as part of that reordering, the police and military be ethnically reconstituted at the top and the bottom. Resolution of inter-ethnic conflict will be tenuous if the security that is achieved is merely state security and not security for each of the state’s resident communities.”
In Guyana, the Disciplined forces could not even secure state security: witness the armed attacks launched against it.
Few objective analysts would argue that our Police Force has served the interests of our people from its founding in 1839. The problem, we have taken pains to emphasise, is not necessarily with the individuals who comprise the Force (every organisation will have its share of bad apples) but with the nature of the force itself.
Our Police Force was constituted as a force to pacify, first the African ex-slaves and then the Indentured Indians. Its organization, modus operandi and its ethos were all geared towards keeping the natives in their “place”. I ask anyone, what has changed in those areas since independence? Additional de-professionalisation ensues when the government in office has to use ‘other means’ to secure police ‘compliance because it is not seen as ‘kith and kin’.
The reality is that we all look at the force through ethnic lenses and only complain when our group is facing the fire – literally. From the onset, we called for the Disciplined Forces to be professionalised. Our early calls in the late eighties were interpreted as partisan – and anti-PNC, since the forces by then had been made appendages to that regime. Our later calls for the forces to be professionalised by “streamlining it, decentralising it and balancing it” after the January 12th ethnic riots were  again seen in that light – even though events had unfortunately unfolded in accordance with the predictions of our analysis. Most focused only on the “balancing” recommendation – disregarding the wider recommendations for professionalisation – many of which have been incorporated in later official (domestic and foreign) recommendations. When Indian businessmen were being picked off with impunity during 1998 (some thirty in a one year span of 1998-1999), Indians cried foul. After the Police Target Squad became judge, jury and hangmen soon after, Africans cried foul and some organised an “African Guyanese Armed Resistance”.
We all know of the deadly response and counter-reaction to the latter initiative: they all betrayed a lack of confidence in the disciplined forces, especially the GPF. Phantom squads, Taliban, death squads, gangs, all combined to create a killing field in Guyana.
Our country needs a Police Force but the Police Force as presently constituted and constructed cannot satisfy that need. It has become part of the problem. Let us use the latest imbroglio to further the cause of all Guyana. Let us work to create a professional, representative Police Force.

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