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Police shakeup

Aug 26, 2020 Editorial

What is happening in the senior ranks of the Guyana Police Force represents more than a shakeup. It is a full-scale upheaval, with more of the same possibly in the works. It could be attacked as politics and, it is sure to be defended as bringing more competent and trusted administration to force operations.
Highly placed officers have been sent packing, with the cover of leave entitlements due not sitting well or fooling too many. Sending people on pre-retirement leave can hardly be challenged and clears the way for both succession and newer blood to rise to greater challenges. In the next instance, some of those senior men, who may have accumulated a record of being too close to, and too favoured by the previous government are being singled out and sent on their way. Even when they may not have been, the mere suspicion that they may have been too cool, or too hesitant, to respond with the required zeal and energy to the then opposition’s concerns as good has marked them for later targeting, which is now. So, out it is and good riddance.
Now this is only one side of the story, and it focused mainly on who was, or may have been, in the bad books of the new people. The thinking, at this point, is whether all those senior police officers who were beneficiaries of the coalition’s blessings (those still remaining and less visible) will in some shape or form be made to feel the edge of the new government’s disaffections. Things are moving rapidly in the hierarchy of the GPF, and time and events will furnish the best proofs of the decisions made and directions in mind of the new government.
But there is another side to the Guyana police story, which must be told, and we do so now. Some of the men brought back and restored-sometimes recognized and rewarded with promotions-were on the way up and then the ladder on which they were perched had no more rungs left. Stated differently, some of the names and faces of senior replacement police officers have been there before during the time of the old PPP government, and then they fell from grace. They were doing well, according to all reports, and the bottom fell out. From the perspective of the last government, there were not the right people in the right places, some of which places were and are most sensitive at the tactical, strategic, and operational levels.
Now they are back and with a long and hard road ahead of them. The first thing going for them is that they have the confidence of the new administration. In view of the rapidity and quantity of changes at the higher echelons, it is clear that the new government gave these movements much thought, and was ready to take the bull by the horns and set matters right by putting trusted people back into pivotal positions.
It does not matter that some of the people have records that leave questions unanswered, with much left to be desired. This includes whispers about malpractices and other forms of illegalities, inclusive of the ever-present monster of chronic corrupt practices. How this will play out in the days ahead, as things settle down to some state of routine in the GPF, remains to be seen. But if it is back to the usual of something for something in the very lucrative field of police investigations, then this country’s cork is as good as ducked.
If there is one thing that could be said for the departed Granger government, it is that corruption did not disappear altogether in the police force. But there was more care in how arrangements were gone about in the day-to-day practices. That is, police officers, regardless of rank, reengineered themselves to the new realities. The ways in which tempting situations were dealt was more subtle, more out-of-sight, and with more care to cover tracks.
As we examine all this, there is the sense that some of these personnel moves are less of the managing and more of the rearranging, less of the practical and more of the politically empowering. That could come back to haunt.

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