Fatalities and families

May 29, 2019 Editorial

Three bandits are shot dead in Berbice. The tools of their trade were there with them. And so, too, were some of the results of their activities that came about through a reign of terror. Without limiting to the developments in Berbice, a pattern usually follows.
It is almost always from the lips of relations of those who fall before the brunt of police counterforce: So much force?
It is perplexing and troubling: this questioning by relatives before all without shame, remorse, or humanity.
Still, this must be said: there can never be condoning of excessive use of force by the police. Then that is just another form of vigilantism, the most recent episode of which became final in civilian Linden. On the other hand, many times, the departed were neither altar boys nor choirboys.
As one example only, there were police shootings following a spate of bank robberies. Several men died. An enraged inner circle almost instantaneously went on the offensive as to this being uncalled for and unjust.
That was, until there were some conversations and information sharing that proved to be irrefutable. People retreated for they were confronted with the trail that wreaked a lot of blood and death on innocent civilians engaged in the ordinary commerce of the day, like going to the bank.
It was the same story up in the Ancient County. Men pillaged and pummeled the targeted, the vulnerable, the defenseless; on many occasions this took place in the sanctity of their homes. No place was safe; no one was secure.
Citizens were brutalized, traumatized, and dehumanized. It would appear that frequently, the final solution as administered by bandits was simply not necessary. Over reaction and overkill, in circumstances of cowering families, and sometimes paltry resistance. Yet cruelties and deaths visited with the unwelcomed intruders of the night.
There were many rich hauls. And still nobody knew anything, knew none involved, and had nothing to say that would have helped in the uphill fight against crime. It was as if these characters were model citizens, men with records of a civilized kind, hardworking souls of virtue and good character.
It was as if they plundered and took their treasure into vacuums. It was as if bandits robbed at will, reaped the rich harvests of crime, and retreated to count their cash and do nothing else.
They just spent endless days counting and recounting their bloody and murderous pickings, until their next mission to terrorize more people for more takings. They never spent nor splurged. They never flashed nor feasted. They never shared. Nobody knew anything until the perpetrators meet their own abrupt, irrecoverable fall in fusillades of bullets.
The pathetic laments are quick to come: did they have to be killed? Could they not have been shot in the arm? Or the leg? Or somewhere other than the bigger, broader targets? This is not limited to suddenly visible, newly audible citizens of Guyanese origins. These forlorn questions land in unsympathetic fields: no reception, no traction. They are usually without foundation.
For these are all hard men, who had exhibited no restraint, no reluctance to dispatch victims with wanton disregard for life. Those who exemplified, in the worst ways, a patented, chilling ruthlessness are now being asked to be shown mercy.
But this does not rise to any consideration or level mercy: recall that there is no place for the use of excessive force.
For the cornered are not of the kind, who are content to go quietly into the night. Rather, it is going down with guns blazing. The lives of each and every policeman is precious, even more precious than those who have crossed barbaric lines with death in their hearts. It is that stark. Family cries notwithstanding, sometimes it is that finall.

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