The shortcomings of the police

Jul 08, 2015 Letters

Dear Editor,
I have argued elsewhere that the efforts of the Minister of Public Security to reform the Guyana Police Force and enhance the public security environment will go for naught if he continues to rely on the same people at the helm of the organization.
Imagine the police took two hours to arrive on the scene Ganesh Ramlall’s murder, just two days after the Minister handed over to the force eleven vehicles appropriated from the Community Policing Groups.
I refuse to accept that vehicles from that set were not allocated to the West Demerara police for patrol and emergency response purposes. If they were then my original point stands since I cannot see what prevented an earlier physical response at that crime scene.
Incidentally, there seemed to be confusion on the part of the police when they issued a release which asserted that the bandits had stolen victim’s licenced firearm, when in fact the man’s weapon was in his home.
This was a clear indication that no proper initial investigation by way of interviews not to mention preserving its integrity was conducted by the first responders.
Yet we are constantly reminded that ranks are participating in various local and overseas courses. Apparently no one is the least bit interested in knowing if the knowledge those ranks acquire is shared for the benefit of the organization.
We are told that the Minister’s decision was prompted by information provided by the Commissioner of Police, and therefore it would be unbelievable if indeed the patrol capability of the Divisional was not addressed in the allocation.
This brings me to a related issue; one wonders if vehicles are just sent to an area just on someone’s say so, or whether there is some quasi-scientific model that informs the allocation of resources. I rather suspect that the latter is not a feature of the strategic thinking of the Commissioner and his management team.
It is important to note that the patrol function consists primarily of two activities (i) calls-for-service; and (ii) administrative and crime prevention activities.
The latter category includes the presence of patrol units as a crime deterrent, and the availability of emergency units to provide reasonable response times for high-priority calls-for-service.
The demand for services provided by the patrol varies among divisions as a consequence of the geographic and demographic factors that are peculiar to each division.
If the Force really is to move away from rhetoric to reality then the Minister, and by extension the Guyanese people, must be afforded a high level of comfort if data can be provided which will be useful for policy making including but not limited to the time taken to answer the phone from the time it starts to ring; time taken before patrol is dispatched to scene with details; time taken from time of dispatch to arrival at scene; analysis of how the foregoing are impacted e.g. temporal variations of hour, day, weather etc.; analysis of locations and roads across police divisions and patrol shifts.
We need serious action to back assurances; no more nice sounding hollow phrases which are increasingly becoming an insult to our collective intelligence.
Edmund Syfox

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The shortcomings of the police

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