Dear Editor,
Recent activities involving the police and the public have caused me to renew my call for a behavioural science unit to be established in the Guyana Police Force.
Ranks in police forces around the world will continue to display inappropriate behaviour, the NYPD being a case in point. The Government of Guyana has been investing huge sums of money to reform the Guyana Police Force, focusing on training and other related areas.
Despite these numerous interventions there is still the clarion call for members of the force to be more professional. This is so because the initial issue of the behaviour of the police has not been adequately dealt with.
A lot of emphasis has been placed on technical skills – the organizational skills needed for the force to function, while on the other hand not enough effort has been paid to develop and sustain excellent people skills.
Recently, President Anthony Carmona of Trinidad and Tobago called for members of his country’s police service to be exposed to behavioural psychologists.
Over the years the role of members of the Guyana Police Force has changed. The pendulum has swung three hundred and sixty degrees. The paradign has shifted. No longer can you swear in a policeman, give him a badge and a gun and send him on the street to work. No longer can a policeman depend on his brawn and political conncetions to be effective. Today’s policemen must be part cop, part social worker, part paramedic, part teacher, part computer technician, part pastor, part mining officer and many more parts. In addition a policeman has to deal with issues that are political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental. In confronting those issues a policeman must interact with his superiors, his peers, his subordinates, his family, his friends and members of the public. Hence, the real need apart from developing technical skills is to acquire effective people skills. These are the critical skills required for a policeman to deliver the highest quality of service to the people he serves in a diverse society.
A few years ago, in order to address interpersonal people management and technical skills in the Guyana Police Force, the Government of Guyana in collaboration with the Emergence Group TEG) of the United States conducted a one year comprehensive training programme for the members of the force – TEG is presently training the SWAT team. Together with TEG I conceptualized, designed, developed and implemented this programme. Among the topical areas covered were, effectively dealing with people, effective investigations, crime scene management, policing in a multicultural and diverse society, designing, developing and implementing programmes to enhance the delivery of quality service, problem solving, human rights, anger management, emotional intelligence, strengthening the police internal and external accountability system, self-esteem, computer enhanced decision-making for police professionals, and capacity building for the Felix Austin Police College. Each programme had a ‘train the trainers’ component whereby participants were trained to teach the relevant subject areas. According to the IDB loan document the comprehensive training programme was designed to develop the Guyana Police Force’s ability to analyse patterns of incidents and problems to be able to provide evidence-based sustainable solutions that will effectively identify and reduce or eliminate the causes of the problems and not just treat symptoms. They were excellent training programmes that started to bear fruit.
These training programmes must be aggressively sustained to reach all members of the force. Sustainability is of utmost value to the organization. The current force training officer, Senior Superintendent Paul Williams who has a law degree from the University of Guyana is quite capable of making this a reality by utilizing the facilities of the various police colleges to conduct the training. However, he needs help. A great amount of human and non-human resources must be available to him to carry out the training which would be the catalyst for change in the force.
Kirkpatrick’s Model of Training Evaluation that focuses on four levels of evaluation – reaction, learning, behaviour and results or a cost benefit analysis, or return on investment ‒ can be used to ascertain whether or not the police have received or are receiving value for massive sums of money spent.
In 1989 the Caribbean Heads of Government adopted a concept entitled The Ideal Caribbean Person.’ That concept fits nicely into Unesco’s learning objectives. They are to learn to live together, learn to be, learn to do and learn to learn. Coming out of those objectives are serious imperatives for the police of all ranks.
The imperatives require that policemen develop good communication skills and are able to resolve conflict. Do you resolve conflict through the barrel of a gun? Do you resolve conflict by assaulting unarmed persons, including women and children? The must be culturally sensitive, andt be multi-language – Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and French. They must have high self-esteem and be able to manage emotional intelligence. They must be able to think critically, and have the capacity to act, to apply knowledge, to comprehend, to research and to analyse. All those imperatives and many more must be the common attributes of a policeman’s operational life. The time is ripe for the establishment of a behavioural science unit in the Guyana Police Force. It should be made up of local and overseas experts using local and international best practices. The unit will be able to develop, implement and evaluate programmes with a focus on the behaviour of all members of the force, cutting across political, racial and ethnic lines. These programmes will enable the police to move from one which regularly depends on incident driven and reactive crime approaches and strategies to effectively analysing patterns of crime and violence, thus, providing an opportunity for them to be more proactive and conduct more intelligence-led policing.
I wish members of the Guyana Police Force well in their fight against crime and the fear of crime. Remember behind every dark cloud there is a silver lining. The cloud will soon roll by.
Yours faithfully,
Clinton Conway
Assistant Commissioner
of Police (rtd)
