Who is going to investigate whom?

Jun 27, 2019 Editorial

This society is in more trouble than it knows. When suspicions and reports swirl around the head of criminal investigations for a country’s law enforcement agency, that is a most grave situation. While every benefit must be given, on the face of things, there are too many connected and reasonable threads either to suppress or ignore.

The key is this: who is going to investigate? The investigators could, for the most part, be trusted insiders as previously recruited and placed in sensitive positions by him. The managers of such a probe could be contemporaries and institutional presences that go way back. Those are ties of a binding quality in regular life; in police life everywhere, there are those unswerving loyalties, that unalterable camaraderie. To the core, this is one of own; this is blood and family.

Conversely, there is almost national resignation to the fact that the GPF is saturated with the terrifyingly troubling: of character; of integrity; of clean, professional servanthood. Therefore, another question: aside from what may turn out to be friendly, superficial, helpful inquiries, who is there that is in a position (clean enough) to rise to the challenge of the circumstances? Who is there that is confident enough to dig deep enough, to push the envelope of the blue wall to get to the truths? Who is there that is concerned enough (and untouchable enough) to let the dots lead to where they connect? The territory is barren.

Separately, the exposures and hurts of alleged wrongdoing are in the heartland of an opposition stronghold, of an area with a particular and known racial concentration. A savaged, jaded, and vulnerable community assumes the worst. For when someone, whoever it is, can all the way from Georgetown, reach out with purpose and the accompanying power first to relay to wrongdoers, then to rearrange felony wrongdoing, and finally to recruit criminal forces to silence the threatening, then matters have clearly rushed past the ordinary. Though all of this still resides in the realm of allegations, the next question is: whither security? Any kind of security?

If only partially accurate, these are frightening developments. For if a nation cannot trust, not its constables and corporals foraging for cheap hustles and squeezes of criminal partners, but its captains and commanders in its law enforcement machinery, then what does it have? Truth be told, it has nothing. Nothing comforting. Nothing reliable. Nothing just.

Whether believed exaggerated or sickeningly unreal, this could be among the grotesque realities: that during times of severe trauma, spilled blood, and dead bodies, the men and women in the uniform of the state have come to the scenes of violent crimes to account for any loose ends, close out the deal, and go through the motions of professional and justice-driven investigations. This is what is suspected and feared in many stricken homes and communities across an increasingly beleaguered Guyana. All of this may be found unthinkable and, thus, unacceptable to Guyanese; regrettably, this peculiarity would be only among the few remaining naïve and innocent in the midst.

This is not a good place, nor an authoritative place, from which any police agency of the state should find itself operating. Unfortunately, this is the place from which the Guyana Police Force finds itself functioning. The people on the inside are against it being otherwise. The broad, loaded criminal class on the outside knows how to undermine it and get its members, senior and junior, to be otherwise. And the besieged communities all over have come to realise and agonise it being this far gone, and seemingly unfixable.

Who will stand up from the inside? Where is the Frank Serpico from within, even one? Where is the groundswell of the concerned and conscientious from the wide world of Guyana? This has to be followed wherever it leads, whoever is involved.

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