Early on Wednesday morning a West Demerara murder suspect who was being held at the La Grange Police Station escaped custody reportedly through a hole in the wall of the cell where he was being held. He had surrendered to the police on the previous day and, it would seem, had had a subsequent change of heart about being in police custody, after all.
If it may seem offensive to make light of what is a serious matter, there is no mistaking the touch of pantomime that attends the incident. Outrageously, occurrences of this nature are not altogether rare. The record of the Guyana Police Force (GPF) in so far as properly securing persons in its custody is littered with anomalies. What is more the public is never favoured with official reports into these occurrences, if indeed most of them are ever really investigated. We find ourselves having to accept these Kafkaesque tales about prisoners vanishing through holes in cell walls at police stations as though the police were a law onto themselves and members of the public were gullible. It is, frankly, a ridiculous state of being.
These days, the escape of prisoners from lawful custody is attributed either to some laughable inadequacy in the GPF’s custodial facilities or else to ‘inside’ complicity in the disappearances. There are times when we are simply not told anything at all about the circumstances of the escape as though escaping prisoners is not a matter that warrants public attention.
As has been noted before, Anthony Jagroo, the 20-year-old murder accused who disappeared through a hole in the wall of his cell at the La Grange Police Station a week ago is not the first escapee to do so. We are also to assume, it seems, that the hole in the cell wall took him entirely outside the police station itself. Evidently, the Force has lost none of its appetite for tall tales. Setting the official version aside, the best that can be said is that last week’s occurrence like those that preceded it, was, at best, an act of criminal negligence for which it would quite simply be unacceptable for those responsible not to have to answer.
The other cause for worry, of course, is that murder suspects are included among those who escape police custody. Whenever that happens it gives rise to justifiable public anxiety that the practice is not engaging the attention of the public security top brass.
We can go back to February 2009 when a teenage murder accused named Leon Paul escaped from the Turkeyen Police Station. A policewoman was subsequently placed under house arrest. In June of the previous year murder accused Jermaine ‘Skinny’ Charles escaped from the police lockups shortly after an appearance in the Sparendaam Magistrate’s Court on a murder charge, only to be killed by police on the Soesdyke-Linden highway a few weeks later. Fast forward to December last year when two men in police custody for the murder of a Linden businesswoman escaped from the Mackenzie Police Station, reportedly by smashing a hole through a cell wall. In this instance too there were suggestions of support for the escape by a police rank who allegedly allowed one of the detainees to use his cell phone.
In each of these instances the Force trotted out roughly the same excuse, and there has been no subsequent evidence of a rise in the temperature of official public security concern in the wake of these occurrences.
We forget, sometimes, that experience has nurtured a generous level of public cynicism so that government is indulging in an exercise of self-deception if it believes that official chatter about raising public security standards will be taken seriously when murder suspects can disappear through holes in cell walls, not infrequently, it seems, with ‘inside’ help. Recently, the GPF may have experienced some interludes of success in its crime-fighting pursuits, though that is hardly reason for it to get ahead of itself. Holes in walls and other structural defects at police lockups coupled with what would appear to be integrity issues among some policemen are reflections of levels of indifference and ineptitude that still compromise our public security profile. The police, surely, cannot expect to be taken seriously if they regularly display a propensity for being unable to secure prisoners properly. It is for the political policy-makers as much as the professional top brass to answer for these unacceptable shortcomings.
