Crazy things going on in the police force

Aug 18, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

On Monday evening, outside of Kaieteur News, I was about to open my car door. This gentleman on a motorcycle rode right up to me. He had a holster slung on his shoulder with a gun inside. It looked like he also had a transmitting set strapped to his waist. He donned a pair of gloves, the kind motorcyclists use on those Harley Davidson types. I wasn’t scared. It was right outside of Kaieteur News and the surveillance cameras are in operation.
He was polite and soft-spoken. He said his name is Sukra and he is a lance corporal based at Brickdam police station. He told me he came on behalf of the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR). He wanted me to write a statement based on a column I wrote on August 5 captioned, “A strange thing is happening inside the police force.” It was about an incident I witnessed, of random traffic stops on the Railway Embankment. I mentioned the name, Adesima Newtown and the licence plate of his car.
Lance corporal Sukra said through a police search of the licence plate, they caught up with Mr. Newtown and he gave a statement. They wanted a statement from me. I told Mr. Sukra all that I saw is contained in my column. But he said he preferred a document from me as early as Tuesday morning. I told him it had to be handwritten, since my printer has been out of order for almost a year now. He agreed to collect the handwritten testimony, the next morning (Tuesday) after my matutinal jogging in the National Park. Mr. Sukra called my cell phone three times on Tuesday morning for the statement. I said it was raining in stormy style and that I didn’t go to the National Park.
Before Mr. Sukra left, I told him that I thought that the desire to eradicate random stops was a special concern of Police Commissioner Seelall Persaud, but Mr. Persaud is gone. He said that it goes beyond Mr. Persaud. I then indicated to Mr. Sukra that since I wrote that particular column, I have seen traffic ranks doing random stops. I told him I saw it last Friday outside Brickdam police station. When the ranks saw me pulling over, they desisted.
I also gave more information to Mr. Sukra. I suggested he contact Mr. Ashan Bacchus. He is a school teacher at Sister’s Primary School in Berbice. Mr. Bacchus is willing to speak to the police. He gave me permission to quote him in the August 5 column, which I did. He sent me three photographs of ranks at Springlands in Berbice making routine halts the very next day after that column came out. The very next day after that column was published, I got a text informing me that ranks were doing the routine halts outside the Leonora station.
The police force is confusing me and maybe all Guyanese. The OPR wants to discipline traffic cops who do the routine stops. To this effect, they have sent two policemen over a six-week period to Kaieteur News to talk to me. But this routine thing is ubiquitous. The OPR can see it if they want to. All they have to do is get a plainclothes cop to ride around Georgetown and especially up the lower East Coast, lower East Bank and West Coast of Demerara, and he will see uniformed traffic cops stepping onto the middle of the road and at random pulling over motorists.
What is going on with the senior leadership of the police force that they have to take a statement from two victims – Lisa Smith and Adesima Newtown – and now me? These pullovers are as perennial as the grass. Motorists encounter them all the time. The traffic chief told me and I featured it in one of my columns, that he has issued a countrywide edict that the routine halts must not be done. Did he do it? The Commissioner spoke to the press about it. This was over sixteen months ago. The traffic chief gave me that assurance since January of this year. Now on Tuesday, the acting Commissioner of Police is continuing where his functional superior left off.
But there is confusion, thus the word “crazy” in my title above. If the Commissioner of Police, the Traffic Chief and now the acting Commissioner want routine stops to be discontinued, then surely those junior ranks that persist with the practice cannot be acting alone. I believe the commanders at the stations are the culprits.

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Crazy things going on in the police force

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