There may well be no nexus between what Acting Police Commissioner Leroy Brummell had to say about interior crime at the Police Officers Conference earlier this week and the story carried in last Friday’s edition of the Stabroek Business on the same issue.
One doubts very much that Brummell would deny that the present policing arrangements in the interior areas of Guyana are, to say the least, unsatisfactory and that the proliferation of crime in those regions appears to reflect a recognition on the parts of the criminals that this is indeed the case.
The problem of course is that over the years no serious and sustained effort has been made to incrementally strengthen the capacity of the Guyana Police Force to provide effective policing in those regions. Small, ill-equipped and scattered police stations have not been the answer nor do we believe that limited police patrols over vast expanses of hinterland will solve the problem.
Several developments as far as interior security is concerned pose a particularly daunting task for the police. The first has to do with the openness of our borders and what has been the increasing movement of people across those borders. Guns, among other things, have been smuggled into Guyana and several miners have told this newspaper that unlicensed weapons have now become commonplace in the interior.
The movement of weapons across our borders has given rise to the second problem, that is, that there is every likelihood that the criminals and not the police may possess a monopoly of force at least in some parts of the interior. If, as may well be the case, the police are out-muscled in those areas, that circumstance is unlikely to inspire confidence for the people living and working there.
The second development has to do with the fact that some interior locations, mainly mining locations, have become particular targets for bandits. The robbery attacks appear well organized and executed and many of them occur at locations that are distant from police outposts so that the police themselves cease to be a deterrent. The robberies aside, it appears that the mining communities also often become the locale for violence sparked by disputes of one kind or another and these too have led to killings.
Finally, there is the challenge of reassessing the security situation in the interior in the context of the economic focus which it has become. These days the overwhelming majority of investment in Guyana targets the interior-located extractive industries. In the case of the gold industry, the returns have inherent value, can be readily exchanged for cash and are highly valuable even in small quantities. That is why gold is so attractive to bandits.
It is, above all else, the ongoing economic shift away from the coast and into the interior that saddles the police with the obligation to respond. The scale of the shift, the challenges presented by the vastness of the terrain and various other difficulties associated with the interior mean that the police must adapt a comprehensive strategy not only for protecting the mining sector but for policing the interior as a whole.
We have learnt in a general sort of way that the force will persist in its ‘strategic, proactive’ approach to interior security though few details have been provided regarding just what that approach might comprise. What is undoubtedly clear even to the uninitiated, however, is that a piecemeal approach characterized by limited patrols is unlikely to solve the problem. It will take significant investments to create the kind of infrastructure necessary to effectively police the interior. More than that it is difficult to see how interior policing can be administered from a Divisional Command Centre that is stuck in the city.
Interior security is not just some short-term emergency; it is a longer term challenge that is linked to, among other things, significant and long-term transformations in the focus of our economic development. The police force is not the only institution that has to respond to the challenge of that shift but effective policing will certainly be a key and critical issue if the country’s economy is to secure the anticipated returns.
