A glaring shortcoming

May 31, 2014 Editorial

Someone once said that miracles take a while and that the impossible takes a while longer. In the case of Guyana one would be tempted to say that the obvious takes a long time and the difficult is never even contemplated.
Last weekend, the news came that a man was found dead on the side of a roadway leading to the Eccles Industrial Site. The body was properly clad in a manner that suggested that the wearer was no stranger to money. The police claimed that the man was unidentified.
From the point of view of the police the body remained unidentified for the remainder of Saturday, all of Sunday, all of Monday right up to Tuesday morning. But by Monday the media had already identified the victim. After the newspaper of Tuesday had carried the story that identified the body the police then issued a statement confirming what the media had known more than a day earlier.
This was most unusual and it caused people to question this concept of a modern police force. It also challenges the method used by the police to remove bodies from scenes of crime. Many of us have seen that the first thing the police would do would be to bag the hands of the victim. This has nothing to do with style. It has to do with preserving the fingerprints.
The next thing the police or the medical examiner would do would be to thoroughly examine the body and this is a good thing to do. For example, in this case, the people who discovered the body concluded that it was that of a victim of a hit and run.
It was not until the medical examiner turned the body over that he saw gunshot wounds, one of them to the back of the left ear. There and then they knew that they were dealing with a killing.
But what would make us question the ability of the police is the fact that it failed to release the identity of the victim within hours of the discovery of the body. The police would have arrested this individual in connection with a gruesome murder and robbery at Bartica. They would have photographed the individual.
As fate would have it, they would later issue a wanted bulletin for the individual, noting the various distinguishing marks on his body.
The prison authorities would have been the next to make a positive identification in a hurry. They would have had the prisoner stripped down to his barest minimum, if not entirely naked. They would have had him in their custody for three years.
Indeed, it was a prisoner who was the first to announce the identity of the body found on the Eccles roadway. We are told that the man’s relatives immediately knew who the person was from the moment they saw the photographs.
An efficient police would have processed the fingerprints lifted from the body and within minutes would have known whom they had. These were the police who solved some crimes including murders that had threatened to run cold, based on fingerprints they had in their possession. They were recently the recipients of a piece of sophisticated equipment that enabled them to scan thousands fingerprints in a matter of minutes.
We do not want to believe that the police took a break over the holiday weekend. For sure the media did not. The police are also aware that the longer that they take to act on a matter the less likely would they solve the crime; the trail gets cold.
We would want to believe that the police knew all along but were not prepared to say anything because their investigators were enjoying the holidays. We also want to believe that some of the policemen were scared because the victim had threatened their lives. The result was that they wanted to make doubly sure that he was dead.
Whatever the case the police should not been in a quandary over the identity of the slain man. Such things only serve to tarnish the reputation of a police striving to be as modern as any in the world.

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