On Tuesday October 18, the Stabroek News’s editorial titled ‘Crime statistics and public security’ raised the issue of the relevance of the crime figures routinely published by the Guyana Police Force (GPF) in the context of the role that the figures play in helping the public to arrive at a reliable assurance regarding just how safe we are. The issue here has to do with whether we can take to the bank, so to speak, the figures provided by the police or whether, for one reason or another, there might be good reason not to rely on them as a yardstick for measuring the extent of our safety.
The point which the editorial was seeking to make on Tuesday was made on the same day when it was reported in the media that a couple had been trailed from a city bank to the Bourda Market by armed men and robbed ‘in high day time’ whilst they were making their purchases. Armed robbery, under any circumstance, is a dangerous and frightening thing for the victims; when, however, such a crime is perpetrated with the level of daring and impunity as exemplified in Tuesday’s Bourda Market occurrence, it has an impact that extends way beyond the singularity of the incident. People hold it up as a microcosm as a wider culture of daring that underpins the commission of crimes in Guyana. They see such incidents as examples of excursions into new heights of criminal daring and they emerge from their analyses of incidents like the Tuesday Bourda Market robbery with a sort of there, but for the grace of God, go I.
Thereafter, many of them descend into a kind of siege mentality, looking over their shoulders having just emerged from a bank (or ATM) and glancing cautiously around them after every purchase in a municipal market. (What an utterly absurd state of affairs!)
No less interesting is the fact that in the same week that the issue of crime and public security arose in the editorial columns of the Stabroek News, the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) announced that its first Security Forum and Exposition will be held on Friday, making the point in its media release that “security concerns continue to rank high as a barrier to investment” and that the GCCI’s concern was with “empowering business owners to be proactive in safeguarding themselves against criminal threats.” Obviously drawing on its own perception of the magnitude of the crime threat, the GCCI alludes to what it says is “the growing need for business owners to gain knowledge on security strategies,” a need that clearly derives from the increasing creativity and daring of the criminal element and the proliferation of dangerous weapons in robberies.
What is of further interest is that the GCCI and the police have held previous consultations on crime, the most recent one (again according to the GCCI’s statement) having been held “earlier this year.” And while the GCCI says that it secured access to “a high level team from the Ministry of Public Security and the Guyana Police Force… with the objective of discussing how security in Guyana can be improved,” there has been no significant feedback from either the police or the chamber on the outcome of that exchange, though one is not necessarily saying that the full details of the exchange can be disclosed.
Again it is, it seems, a matter of the police revisiting its public image strategy, understanding in the process that its audiences, that is, those who are exposed to the messages contained in its crime statistics, are recipients of multiplicity of messages and that theirs must compete with information (and perceptions) gleaned from other sources and which, from the standpoint of believability, frequently challenge their own.
There is a role here for the business support organizations (BSOs) like the Private Sector Commission (PSC) and the GCCI. At a press conference on Tues-day both GCCI President Vishnu Doerga and Vice President Nicholas Boyer agreed that recent police assurances regarding a recent reduction in “serious crimes” notwithstanding, public concern continues to be informed by feelings of insecurity. The chamber has been saying a great deal about its interaction with the police and its internal fora – like today’s security forum – though, frankly, it has been rather less robust in making clear what, by its own admission is a creeping concern that the criminals may well be at least one step ahead of law enforcement.
