Dear Editor,
It was just a few days ago that I had cause to comment on the state of the Guyana Police Force and call for drastic reforms in the operations and management of the Force. As if to confirm all my fears and expose all that is wrong with this institution, Dameon Belgrave lays dead, and the Police Force and this government must take full responsibility for this criminal tragedy. To date there is yet to be a response from President Ramotar or any member of his cabinet. Instead the official government newspaper the Guyana Chronicle wasted precious column inches in their letter section, to politicize the death of 21 year old Dameon Belgrave. Having witnessed Mr. Belgrave’s autopsy and seeing his cold lifeless young body lying there, it was difficult to control the rage that welled up inside of me, for here was a bright young black man who did not deserve to die.
Kaieteur News Columnist Ravi Dev in lending his voice to the call for a professional police force chose to place great emphasis on having an ethnically balanced organization. I understand Mr. Dev and I respect him, you see Mr. Dev is an Indian rights activists and a strong advocate for all things Indian. Like Mr. Dev I returned home after several years of self imposed exile, and yes I am very serious about change. However you can have an ethnically balanced force and still have the same type of scenarios that Mr. Dev was at pains to recount in his Sunday column. You see in Military and Para-military organizations it is not about the ethnic makeup, it is all about leadership and training. The young police officers, who discharged their weapons in a crowded public square, did so because somewhere there was a breakdown in command and doctrine. A well trained and commanded unit would have appreciated the situation and adjusted their posture to suit. This has nothing to do with ethnic balance because the shooters were black and the murdered were black. The Dameon Belgrave incident was no accident, Dameon was not killed by a stray bullet, because the policemen who discharged their firearms did so to harm or to kill the young men they were pursuing. In law what happened is known as transferred malice; when the intention to harm one individual inadvertently causes a second person to be harmed instead; under the law, the individual causing the harm will be seen as having “intended” the act by means of the “transferred intent” doctrine.
Editor, I will continue regardless of the noise, to say, that what we have here is a police force that is out of control, with poor training and weak and ineffective leadership. Mr. Ravi Dev may have the luxury of pontificating for a more balanced police force, but as a black man in Guyana I do not have that luxury and neither do the mothers and relatives of Shaquille Grant, Dameon Belgrave, Shemroy Bouyea, Allen Lewis, Ron Somerset and the many others who were killed at the hands of this ethnically unbalanced police force.
For many pundits and the supporters of the PPP, this is a game of political musical chairs, but for the families and the deceased the reckless action of the National Police is finite. We know that the PPP government has ignored the Security Sector Reform act; we know that help with reforming the force has been refused on grounds that are utterly spurious. The time is long past for posturing and ethnic grandstanding, the current status quo cannot continue, and the PPP regime must know that it is unsustainable. At the moment a large segment of the population has no faith and does not trust the Police to protect them. In fact in most poor African communities the Police are seen as the “enemy”. The civilian leadership of the police force along with the government must act now to avoid the inevitable collision that will occur if there is no change. I say now without fear of contradiction that it will be wise to fix the Guyana Police Force now, rather than face the consequences of inaction.
Yours faithfully,
Mark Archer
