Police Change?

Jan 06, 2013 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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We are pleased that, even though late, the police force is about to undergo a makeover. Our entry into politics was occasioned by an unwillingness or inability of the Guyana Police Force to do its job. In 1999, when ROAR was launched it was the acronym for “Rise, Organise And Rally” against crime. It was not coincidental that we issued a detailed plan for police reform that was centred on the need to reorient, “balance”, streamline, supplement, decentralise and the GPF.
What we emphasised was that our Police Force does not just need its “capabilities upgraded”; it needs a complete makeover in its composition, values and raison d’etre.
As we wrote, “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.” We are happy that the new Strategic Plan agrees.
Unfortunately, it ignored the need for ‘proportionality’ of composition in the GPF. “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.
In 2003, under direct Constitutional mandate, a Disciplined Forces Commission (DFC) took submissions across the country on how to professionalise the Forces. They submitted their recommendations in 2004 to Parliament. On the matter of ethnic representativeness they declared: “The Commission…is of the view that the allaying of ethnic security fears which stems from the predominance of Afro-Guyanese presence in the GPF must be addressed…but to ensure, in so doing, that no similar insecurity fears are caused in the Afro-Guyanese community.”
Exactly as we had proposed in our submission, the DFC recommended, “It should be an aim (of the GPF) to achieve a Force representative of the ethnic diversity of the nation without employing a quota system.” We are saying here and now that the Strategic Plan will fail if it should not adopt this key recommendation of the DFC. It would be ironic if it takes Brig General (Retd.) David Granger, Leader of the PNC/APNU, who was a member of the DFC, to point out this lacuna.
While the Plan further decentralises the GPF by splitting Divisions E&F, it does not go far enough. “In the end, all good policing is local policing. Practically every police organisation in the world – apart from those in totalitarian states – is 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.” Only the latter was suggested.
We commend the Strategic Plan as a good beginning. But we need to go further. 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 the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) unit?

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