Blue Danube waltz and Kitty Police Station

May 16, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

What you are about to read you may not be inclined to believe. You may put it down to journalistic embellishment, columnist’s imagination or just the act of being funny. Well, it is none of the three. The story is true. On Saturday morning I was on the computer keyboard typing my (last) Sunday Kaieteur News column on the Mephisto waltz by Franz Liszt when the phone rang.
Aubrey Baptiste of Matt’s Record Bar informed me that he has a special CD of orchestra music for me. I went down to get it after typing my Sunday article. This CD has a great version of Johann Strauss’ famous Blue Danube Waltz; by any standard the most popular composition in the classical genre (there is a fascinating CD from the world famous magazine, “Reader’s Digest” titled, “The Best of Romantic Waltzes”) Now here was I typing a column on a German waltz and in the middle of writing it, I got a call about another German waltz.
Surely Aubrey couldn’t know I was doing a piece on German waltz? How could he know that when I wasn’t even half way through my article? It just goes to show how strange this life is. And since I wrote about waltz yesterday and then I got a CD on the Blue Danube Waltz, maybe it is best to continue on that theme seeing that we are now one year into the Coalition in power and the application of the waltz to Guyanese politics is trenchantly germane.
One can waltz into love or waltz into serenity or waltz into the pathway of obstacles or tsunamis or volcanoes or earthquakes. After one year of Coalition power, where and what did the APNU-AFC waltz into? Whatever it is, I can tell you, it is not in the direction of the hearts of Guyanese. Maybe that should be a separate column. For me it was a weekend of the descent from the sublime to the simpleton. I collected my Blue Danube Waltz from Matt’s Record Bar and was on to my way home when I got a call from Raymond Persaud, aeronautical engineer at the Eugene Correia airport
Raymond runs a wash bay right next door to the AFC head office on Railway Line. Raymond asked me to come down to the Kitty Police Station. The police picked up one of his workers for alleged theft of a phone that took place a few months back. I went to the Kitty station only to find that this 16 year old youth was handcuffed to the front bench for hours. After taking a statement from the virtual complainant, the police kept waiting for hours for a witness to give a statement indicting the teenager.
Relatives contacted the witness who refused to incriminate the young man. The officer in charge of Kitty CID was told that the witness will not give such a statement. The CID rank was asked to speak to the witness. Based on that, the CID rank told me the teen would be put on station bail. That was it for me. I left. At around 7.30 pm, Raymond called to say that the teen is still handcuffed to the bench and that from the time I left, no one looked into the teen’s situation
What was funny was that as soon as I arrived, the complainant and her relatives began to shout derogative adjectives at the press. The relatives were openly cussing in front of a police station. I informed the ranks of this atrocious behavior but they said they cannot hear the cussing down. It was clear to me that the station ranks knew the complainant and her relatives and were prepared to charge a sixteen year old on the basis of a mere allegation of a foul-mouthed family. I requested that the youth be given bail and the police do their investigation. Bail was assigned but I deeply believe if I wasn’t there, the police would have kept that little fellow maybe until the Coalition faces the electorate again in 2020
While I was at the station, two anti-crime ranks brought in an 18 year old youth and his fourteen year old friend for riding without helmets. The youths told me their employer’s truck broke down on Sheriff and they went to get help in Garnett Street. I accompanied the two little boys into the traffic room but one of the anti-crime police got into my face and wanted to know why I was at the police station. I told him that was none of his business. The police are slowly destroying people’s trust in them

2 thoughts on “Blue Danube waltz and Kitty Police Station”

Keith Williams May 16, 2016 at 6:15 am

What is frustrating, is that we see and hear of these behaviors every day, and the Government seem to be paralyzed in its response. The fact that the Police has not changed in their approach to their work, and still exhibit this neanderthal like backwardness suggest that, to them, nothing has changed.

Tomorrow you can learn of some one dialing 911 or a Police Number and getting no response. And there is also no action taken about this. How can the Government care about crime and reducing it, when it ignores breakdowns in systems designed to speed up the police response to crimes. It is all nonsense.
pollard May 16, 2016 at 12:41 pm

This story is so true with the police, RUIMVELDTH POLICE station is a place where the same things happen.