Big corruption scheme in the police force

Aug 26, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

It didn’t make sense to me. I thought about it, but in the end accepted that the Guyana Police Force is one of the worst in the world, and will continue to be a sordid, unprofessional bunch. So I stopped thinking about it. Actually I had the answer; so I thought. My conclusion was that it was a way of the lower ranks topping up their salary.
What am I talking about? Each time I saw the occurrence of a random traffic stop, and wrote about it, it continued all over Guyana the next day, the very next day. Many times I would call the commanders of the various stations and they would assert in unambiguous language that the force has discontinued random traffic stops. But the station of that very commander, the very next day, would do the random stops. I could only have found one answer – the constables want some money.
In fact, my explanation is shared by countless numbers, including very educated and intelligent people. They all believe that traffic cops take money during those random stops. But there is a hidden, dangerous dimension to this money-collection scheme. It was explained to me last Tuesday by a detective. Everything has now fallen into place. I now know why a station chief would apologize to me for his men doing the sudden halt sign to oncoming traffic, yet the next day the identical deportment is displayed right in front of the station.
Here now are details of a huge corruption scheme in the police force that Commissioner Seelall Persaud knew about, after complaints from the Government in December 2014 were made to him. Persaud then tried to derail the corruption train as early as the beginning of 2015, but he was ignored by senior officers who run the scheme. Persaud persisted and tried to get around the recidivist tentacles of the senior officers by going through the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) which police officers and the government would like us to believe is the equivalent of the Department of Internal Affairs (IA) that you find in the police force of most States in the USA.
This is not only a joke, but a manifestation of asininity. In the US, IA officers are insulated from the powerful big wigs who run the anti-crime departments in the respective States. In States like California and New York, the anti-crime big-wigs do not even know who these IA personnel are. The IA personnel cannot be given orders by the very people they are investigating. In Guyana, the OPR is run by people who are subordinate to the very seniors that they will have to investigate.
Seelall Persaud failed to stop the random traffic halts and to get OPR to investigate corruption on the streets that stems from those random stops. Why did Persaud fail? Because the random traffic edict is a huge corruption racket run by some very top police officers. Here is how it works. Each day, the junior rank has to collect a sum of money from drivers who were stopped but whose papers were not in order. The day’s take is then shared with the constable, his immediate senior and the ultimate senior officer. Each month, these corrupt officers take home hundreds of thousands of blood dollars coerced from drivers.
Depending on the violation, the payment begins from $5,000. If you do not have a driver’s licence, it is $10,000. All one has to do is take a cheap calculator and do the simple calculation. If a constable stands on Vlissengen Road facing Kitty Public Road and he stops a hundred drivers in three hours, out of that hundred, twenty will not have all their required papers. It is hardly likely that he will collect $5,000 from each erring driver. Some will pay as much as $12,000 depending on the fault. Do the calculation; these men take home a whopping sum each month.
It was no accident, or it wasn’t coincidence, that Zena Henry, a practicing journalist, wrote that the first thing the anti-crime unit asked her for was her documents. They didn’t stop her to search the car first. They knew she was alone and they knew there was no suspicion to warrant a search. But they wanted to see her papers. Once she fell short, money would have been requested. The detective told me one senior officer in full view of other ranks shouted to a constable; “Yo! Yuh shaart dis month!” Translated, it means, you were short in your payment this month. The constable didn’t collect the agreed sum. Maybe he stopped drivers who were too poor to pay.

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Big corruption scheme in the police force

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