It was clear from the tone of Tuesday’s Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) media release that the chamber is pretty sore over what it believes is the evidence provided in Monday’s spate of robberies that the police are not doing enough to protect the business community.
This is not an unreasonable position. Deterring crime that targets the business community is not a test that the police have passed with what one might call flying colours. Indeed, what President of the GCCI Mr Clinton Urling calls the “ebb and flow” of criminal attacks that target the business community has assumed a pattern which suggests that the criminals have long come to understand the ways of the force.
One would have thought that the protection of the business community ought to be one of the important functions of the Guyana Police Force. Since, as Mr Urling pointed out, potential overseas investors tend to take their cue from – among other things – the extent to which the host country can provide protection from criminal attacks.
The GPF has taken its own fair share of ‘beating up’ from the business community and from the rest of the society over anti-crime initiatives that simply do not work. More than that, those businessmen and women who have, over time, come to understand the ways of the police force, have long opted for their own security measures. While the police may take no great pride in this fact, only some business people take the institution seriously.
This week’s call from the chamber for more police protection for the business community is nothing new. It has not worked in the past. Though at least this time around Mr Urling is sufficiently informed to be aware that the inefficiencies and inadequacies of the force are as much (perhaps more) a political consideration than they are a function of operational deficiencies. Put differently, unless the powers that be assume a more committed posture to effective policing, the business community and the rest of the national community, for that matter, will simply have to put up with an inadequate police force and with the periodic impact of marauding criminals. While this is by no means a way of neglecting to point fingers at the examples of operational incompetence that surface frequently in the force, police reform must include more generous spending on training and operating resources.
As far as crime that targets the business community, on the one hand, and the functioning of the police, on the other, are concerned, we have grown accustomed to a pattern of robberies followed by calls (mostly from the business community) for better policing after which there are patronising pronouncements by public officials. Thereafter, we lapse into a familiar comatose indifference from which we are awakened at the start of the next spate of criminal attacks against business houses. As long as there remains the existing glaring deficiency in political will to create a police force that is more responsive to the law-enforcement requirements of the business community and the whole community for that matter no permanent change – which is what we really want – will come. The criminals know this and so do we.
