The US Embassy needs to ask the police a question

Oct 30, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

In Guyana, violence against women is a “federal” offence, meaning it is not confined to geographical location of a police station. The world has frowned upon men bullying women. The courts worldwide have a policy of tough sentencing.
When Zenita Nicholson went to a police station to report domestic abuse, she was told that she had to document the incident to the station within the jurisdiction where she resides. There aren’t words in any vocabulary to describe this moral outrage.
That station official took bureaucracy to insane levels. His/her immediate reaction should have been to make contact with the police personnel in Nicholson’s jurisdiction and transport her there. If there was no vehicle available (as is the case with many stations), then Nicholson’s report should have recorded and the alleged abuser summoned for an explanation. It is possible that Nicholson was perceived as a Lesbian or bi-sexual by the presiding officer so she was flippantly dismissed?
There are large elements of homophobia in the Guyana Police Force and it has allowed killers of homosexuals to remain free. There is a homophobic killer out there. Barrington Braithwaite and I have put together a plausible sketch of him after painstaking journalistic investigation. At the wake of Troy Kellman (of People’s Parliament) on Wednesday night, Barry presented to the table he was at, his sketch. The police hierarchy reads my columns. I will wait to see if they will make contact with me or Barry. Both of us are easy to contact.
My opinion is that the police show little, if any interest in investigating homicides committed against male homosexuals. It is the homophobic instinct that may be the reason. A group of us from the People’s Parliament went to Leopold Street to speak to the relatives of one such victim whose body was badly lacerated.
We knew the victim who would stop and chat with us while passing to go on the “lady of the night” business. The victim’s aunt found his cell phone when they discovered the corpse at St. Philip’s Green on Smith and D’Uurban Streets.
She showed us the phone. As she stretched out her right palm with the phone on it, I was speechless. Such a fundamental approach in detective investigation was overlooked. The police were not interested in serious detective work. How else do you explain that the phone was not labeled as evidence? Any schoolboy would know at a murder scene, the mobile phone of the victim has to be bagged for testing.
There have been three other similar styled killings of homosexuals and to date no one was ever interviewed as a suspect. One was the foster brother of KN’s editor in chief, Adam Harris.
He was killed on the Kingston seawall at the back of what is now the Marriott Hotel, the very night that police were guarding the E-Governance cable that ran under the Atlantic at the back of the Pegasus. I interviewed the two policemen who were stationed at the cable site that night. They said they didn’t hear screams. Harris’s brother was murdered in the still of the night, that is, the early hours of the morning. Yet they told me they didn’t hear screams.
Here now is the shocking dimension. Three days after I went back to the security hut to see those two policemen. Three days after Harris’s brother was murdered, the detectives didn’t interview the two ranks who were stationed yards away from where a brutal murder was committed. The police simply weren’t interested.
Then, there was the actor in Maria Benschop’s theatre company. He was murdered in identical fashion to our friend from People’s Parliament and Harris’s brother in the uncivilized hours of the morning on the Liliendaal seawall. My opinion is that he couldn’t be there at that hour with a complete stranger.
He knew the person he was with. He was bi-sexual. His girl friend, a pumpkin vendor, told me that the police had no serious discussion with her about the company he kept. The police knew he was bi-sexual and weren’t interested in solving the crime
I am surprised that the US Embassy that has been consistently assertive in the condemnation of discrimination against Guyanese citizens that are from the LGBT sphere, has not zeroed in on this egregious neglect of the Guyana Police Force.
There is a strongly built man with military skills that is killing homosexuals he befriends. LGBT people are humans. They have a right to life. Maybe Zenita Nicholson could have been saved if she wasn’t turned away by the police.

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The US Embassy needs to ask the police a question

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