Crime and Intelligence

Sep 15, 2013 Editorial

The official police reports show that the number of armed robberies, especially with the use of guns, has continued its upward march, with a 10 per cent jump over last year. And we have not completed the year as yet. But last year’s figures were themselves reflective of an increase of 16 per cent over 2011. However, in the face of citizens’ outrage at the last week’s spurt of robbery under arms that included two murders, the Commissioner of Police advised that we should “not hit the panic button”.
The Commissioner is out of line to make such a suggestion since the Guyana Police Force (GPF) has not acted in a manner over the past years to engender a more measured reaction by the citizenry. As crime in all categories has risen, especially in the “serious crime” category that subsumes robbery under arms, and the Police appearing completely clueless, the question is what button should the GPF hit?
The GPF is not an institution that has just begun operating: it has been around for 171 years. That is a long time to accumulate an institutional memory on how to solve crimes like robbery under arms in a population that has remained more or less constant for the last fifty years. For this type of crime it is not a secret that the police have always gone after the criminals even before they execute the robberies. The police did this by cultivating good contacts (“informants”, if you will) in the community in which the criminals live. The same technique is relied on after the fact.
Beginning in the 1980’s in the metropolitan countries, the Community Policing (CP) model emerged out of the recognition that the community had been involved in the problem that emerged out of its malfunctioning. While the CP model was resource intensive and led to problems in coordination between the regular police and the community police, it was supposed to improve the information gathering capabilities of the force. In Guyana this model was imported at the beginning of the millennium.
From all indications it does not appear that the extra eyes and ears in the communities have helped the Police. In fact the GPF seems to have even abandoned its long tradition of information gathering. This is rather ironic in view of the fact that in Britain, the model of much of our policing techniques and tactics, and the source of the Community Policing innovation, the latter has been supplemented by what is now defined as “intelligence led policing” (ILP). We believe the GPF should consider its adoption since it is actually driven by new resources that would be additional to the present manpower.
The process begins with information on crime and other deviant sociological behaviour that is collected not only from police informants and being fed to a department of analysts. This raw data is sorted and reformulated to discern trends and patterns of criminal activity both geographically and chronologically.
The analyst in a word, turns the raw data into “intelligence” in which a visual map is created that can be used by police officers in the field to better deploy their resources. Police officers should still cultivate their sources but with ILP they become more focused and are less likely to be “played” since they already have information on the probability of criminal behaviour. The focus of ILP is on prolific offenders which are just what Guyana needs since the information suggests that, overall, most crimes are committed by repeat offenders.
We know that at present, the GPF is implementing a modernisation strategy. We believe this initiative must be supported but it should be modified to include ILP techniques. As in the metropolitan countries, other intelligence gathering units should also share their information with the ILP analysts.
In Guyana, we have learnt to our cost that what might now be random criminal behaviour can quickly morph or be moulded to take on a broader and more insidious role against even the state.
To stop the citizens from hitting the “panic button”, the Commissioner of Police should hit the “reset button” on intelligence gathering.

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