David Hinds plays the race card with the police brutality problem

Apr 06, 2014 Letters

---

Dear Editor,
David Hinds’ letter titled “Police brutality is a reflection of our larger ethno-racial problem” (KN, March 24, 2014) is a volatile piece of writing in a racial volcano of a society. It must be intellectually scoped, probed, gutted and challenged. David Hinds acknowledges police violence since slavery and colonialism; well-known truths. He admits police violence against Africans continued under the PNC regime, another known truth. Police violence continued under the PPP. He concedes that “…what is true is that even under the PNC, Blacks were still more likely to be subjected to summary execution by the police than any other group.” Then Hinds argues “But I contend that the violence of the state against Africans under the PPP deserves closer scrutiny.
One cannot adequately understand and explain the upsurge of police brutality against Black men outside of the interests of those who run the state.” Hinds offers up ethnic domination and ethno-racial dynamics as his explanation for this phenomenon. He asserts “There is a reason why despite widespread crime in both Indian and African Guyanese communities, disproportionately more Black boys are being summarily executed by the police. There is also a reason why Black protest is easily confronted with police violence while Indian protest is not.” He provides the following reasons “Here are the dynamics. The PPP executive government has a known interest in securing the loyalty of the police and other armed forces, which it has repeatedly claimed helped to throw it out of power in 1964. The PPP government also as an inevitable interest in quelling protest and rebellion among the constituency of its political rivals. Finally, the PPP has an interest in demonstrating to its constituency that it can protect them against the deep-seated fear of Black violence both from police and civilians.”
Hinds believes there is an upsurge of police brutality against Africans under the PPP. He provides no statistics, proof, evidence and numbers to back up his claim. Nor does he explain how he arrives at this conclusion and why he believes there has been an upsurge. For Hinds, the entirety of this complex issue is all about the race, ethno-racialism, political manipulation, machination and command of the police by an Indian-dominated PPP government directing an African-dominated police force to summarily execute Africans.
This is starkly dangerous, provocative, bilious and bogus stuff peddled here. The utter majority of police-citizenry interactions have nothing to do with politics and are most definitely not guided by politics. They are based on criminal or suspected criminal behaviour. What the PPP has done just like the PNC, is it has refused to seriously reform and retrain the police force. The heart of the problem of Africans losing their lives or being brutalized at a higher rate than any other ethnic group since 1966 is an unprofessional police force since Independence. This ensures the trigger-happy police continues to target Guyanese and Africans with brutality.
The question must also be asked whether there is a higher incidence of confrontation and interactions between the police and Africans than other ethnic groups and whether this disproportionality contributes to higher African executions and brutality by an African-dominated police force that his known to be trigger-happy? What about those Africans who have lost their lives since 1992 in open and violent confrontation like shootouts with the police – what percentage are they in that 400 figure Hinds produces and does Hinds lump these Africans with the defenceless Africans killed in cold blood by the police?
Surely, with the dramatic increase in police loss of life since 1992 and with the increased criminality of the state overall, one cannot be so bluntly disingenuous and academically deceitful to not explore these more plausible explanations before jumping on the racially charged and politically divisive bandwagon of blaming this entirely or mostly on the political leadership and government of the day.
This is not to say that there is no political interference in the work of the police but to suggest that the African-dominated police force is being pushed by the Indian-centric PPP government to summarily execute and brutalize Africans is nasty foundation-less ethno-racial thinking that could ignite this country in the wrong way. Does Hinds really want us to believe that when a most likely African policeman points a gun at a defenceless African and pulls the trigger instead of handcuffing that citizen, that policeman is in that moment when he has discretion and choice, really making that decision to kill based on what the PPP government wants or he is simply an untrained and callous barbarian with no regard for the life of a fellow citizen?
Police execution of Africans paleS in comparison to the tens of thousands of police-African confrontations, interactions and arrests of Africans made by the police in the past 21 years of PPP rule. Clearly, if there was political direction to slaughter Africans summarily, then the numbers would have been frighteningly higher. Using Hinds macabre reasoning, this is evidently a failed policy by the government of the day as it is evidence that the police force has disobeyed its political master! Hinds commits the error of rampant generalization and straw man creation to make his nonsensical argument. Where is the evidence there is widespread crime in both Indian and African communities?
Hinds states the interests of the PPP are to secure the loyalty of the armed forces, to quell protest among Africans and to show it can protect its own constituency from African and police violence. We have already established that the African police inordinately executing Africans is a problem that predates the current incarnation of the PPP from 1992 so how is this phenomenon now a problem blameable on the PPP government? How does an Indian-centric government in a racially divided country instructing an African-populated police force to slaughter and brutalize Africans going to secure the loyalty of the armed forces? Stating that African protest is easily met with police violence while Indian protest is not is yet another shallow statement that sidesteps the truth that Indian protests will generally not confront the police because of fear while African protesters will because they are not seized of that fear. African police members also know Africans do not fear them and this plus their inadequacies psychologically shapes their response and their propensity to use violence to gain or project control.
Hinds suggests the PPP commands primarily African police to kill and brutalize Africans summarily to quell African protest, rebellion and resistance. As he did in his entire letter, he weakly tried to paint correlation as causation and was wrong here again. Hasn’t history proved this would cause the exact opposite with the African constituency so what value is there in pursuing a failed strategy? Why pursue this strategy in a minority of cases and not in the majority if it is seen as so effective according to Hinds? In Hinds’ mind these acts of an African-dominated police force brutalizing or killing Africans without due process are not acts of an errant police force acting independently, which they are but are acts of the government of the day in an attempt to quell African protest, rebellion and resistance.
I guess the underlying criminal actions of some of those Africans killed summarily by the police were not crimes but protests, rebellion and resistance. How exactly is Hinds equating the PPP’s interest in conveying to its Indian constituency its ability to protect Indians from African police violence with the fact that Hinds contends that an African-dominated police force has gotten even more violent under the PPP? The rush to frame this issue in the agitating hue of ethnicity or race or to make baseless connections with ethnic repercussions is dangerous, irresponsible and inflammatory, not to mention academically spurious, dangerous stuff in a country deep in the mire of racialism and ethnic antagonism. At worst, what we have had since 1992 is a continuation by the PPP of the PNC’s failure to fix and professionalise the police force and with the rise of criminality in Guyana requiring the police to confront more criminal suspects and investigate more crime, this has resulted in this trigger-happy force with thuggish elements executing and brutalizing more of the citizenry. There is a powerful difference between action and omission.
M. Maxwell

---

---