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RESTORING CONFIDENCE IN THE GUYANA POLICE FORCE

Mar 16, 2015 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Lack of public confidence in institutions of the State represents a serious crisis. That lack of confidence manifests itself and leads to a lack of trust in those institutions by the very persons, the people, which those institutions are required to serve.
A recent international survey within Latin America has revealed that there is a poor level of confidence by the citizenry of Guyana in their police force, one of the foremost institutions necessary to ensure the preservation of law and order.
This column holds no brief for this survey. Surveys in Latin America have been notorious for their inaccuracy and are always riddled with allegations and concerns over the credibility of their results.
However, the people of Guyana do not need any international survey to tell them about the lack of confidence in the Guyana Police Force. The people of Guyana know this all too well.
This is not a new problem. It is an old one. It is a recurrent one.
All administrations past and present have failed to rein this problem in. During the time of the PNC, there was rapid loss of confidence in important institutions of the State. This has continued under the PPPC which has failed to restore public confidence in the security services.
At the heart of this problem are two fundamental mistakes. The first is the failure of reform as a strategy to improve professionalism and competence in the Guyana Police Force. Indeed, reform can be said to have contributed to the problem. You do not reform deformed institutions. You do not restructure them also.
Neither does increasing the availability of resources address this problem. If this were the case, public confidence would have been restored in the Guyana Police Force.
What is needed is not reform but the building of a brand new Guyana Police Force. But that is not in the interest of any of the main political parties in Guyana. And so there will continue to be a deficit in public confidence under the present and any future government.
The second major contributor to the decline in public confidence is the politicization of the security services. This reached unprecedented levels under the PNC. Indeed under the PNC, the heads of the security services were required to swear loyalty to the political party in power and not just to the government and to the State. This allowed for a culture to develop within the police force that saw it as being subservient to their political masters. Worse of all in those days the Guyana Police Force did the dirty work of their political masters.
The situation has changed under the PPP. The police are now no longer required to swear loyalty to the ruling party, to spy and harass political opponents to the extent of the past but this has unfortunately not removed the yoke of politicization of the force.
When senior police officers can mention over drinks that they were given instructions from above to do this and to that, they are in effect speaking about the continued political interference and influence in their work.
Political interference and influence is at the root of the problem of lack of confidence in Guyana’s security services. And this is why reform will not work. When such practices become embedded within the culture of an organization, it cannot be reformed away because such reform takes place through policy edict which as we know is the legitimate province of politicians.
Confidence and improved trust in the Guyana Police Force can only come about by dismantling the entire Guyana Police Force and by creating a brand new institution, one that is free from the tentacles of politicians.
Unfortunately that is not going to happen after May 11 because none of the political parties are on that particular page.

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