The deficiency of the police

May 25, 2013 Editorial

There was a high profile killing recently. Gunmen shot and killed a policeman as he approached a car that bore fake number plates. This shooting occurred at dusk at a busy thoroughfare. The gunfire sent people running for cover and bullets scarred the walls of buildings in the area.
Three things were exposed. The close circuit television cameras placed to monitor activities in the area were useless. The Home Affairs Ministry later explained that the camera—it would seem that there was only one—was placed to look down Regent Street, instead of looking southward toward the busiest area in the Stabroek Market area.
In the wake of the shooting there were numerous comments, some attributing blame to the police for the death of the rank. A comment out of the Ministry of Home Affairs was that he did not follow standard operational procedures. However, in every corner of the world whenever a policeman is killed the entire force hunts the killer or killers with a vengeance.
One method used by the metropolitan country is to round up every known criminal element. Indeed, this is a breach of human rights but it often works. Somebody in the underworld would eventually cough up the killers because they, themselves would prefer to live in obscurity.
This is often not the case in Guyana because there are not enough holding facilities to keep those rounded up. But this should not preclude the police from doing serious leg work. This should not preclude the police from using those of their informers. Perhaps they did in the case of the killing of Romein Cleto. The sad thing was that the informers provided any sort of information because they only wanted to be left alone.
A man is picked up days after the police claimed that they found gunpowder residue on his hands. That would suggest that they had him in their custody, tested him and released him. They then compounded their plight by torturing the man and making it known that they tortured him. So shoddy was their work that after the man soiled himself, they tossed away the pants. That garment was left in the yard where it was thrown to be found by a lawyer, days later.
The issue here is that the police have grown increasingly shabby in their investigations. The result is that criminals often walk free. We are in no position to know how many innocent people have been convicted but we do know that many guilty ones have walked free.
The past two years saw intense training of ranks in the Criminal Investigations Department in a programme called the justice Improvement Programme. That programme did not include beating confessions out of people. Instead it spoke of winning the confidence of people who could later become informants.
Over time the police must have realized that it is hopeless to rely on confession statements. Once such statements are procured by methods that are considered to be in contravention of the norms, such statements are thrown out.
And so we come to the botched investigations into Cleto’s killing. The policeman is shot and the car drives away. At no point is that car caught on the close circuit cameras on which the government spent tens of millions of local currency. Surely this cannot be possible; surely someone would have provided a description of the car and the police, having perused the cameras, would have seen something of the car.
The parliamentary opposition must now ask the government to explain the operations of these cameras. We cannot recall the political opposition voting against the budgetary allocations for the cameras. And even if they did, with its parliamentary majority the government would have prevailed with the purchase.
If an explanation is not forthcoming the contractor must be made to pay back the money he collected or to reinstall better cameras at his expense.
There is another side to this. The Director of Public Prosecutions has ordered that the murder charge against the suspected cop killer be dropped. One can expect more of this unless the police change their modus operandi.

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