Dear Editor,
Minister of Home Affairs Clement Rohee in his usual combative style, took the opportunity of his address to the leadership of the police force on December 31, to reply to some comments attributed to the Leader of the Opposition to which he took umbrage. Apparently Mr Granger claimed that Guyanese have little faith in the Ministry of Home Affairs and the competence of the police in particular. As a result Mr Granger concluded, “the security sector and by implication public safety and security have been jeopardized.” Responding to this Mr Rohee labelled these observations, “baseless, without foundation and cannot be justified by the facts.”
Then our Minister proceeded to give us what he considers “the facts” on this issue; he is reported to have pointed to statistical data which he said exposed the inconsistencies and false propagandistic claims in respect to the period during which he had been serving as Minister of Home Affairs. There are three things I want to point out:
1) The Minister can’t compare his period of responsibility with the period immediately preceding his assumption of duty as the Minister of Home Affairs, because the period immediately preceding his was an “unusual” period for crime-fighting in Guyana’s history. It was the period in which an unknown number of our citizens died in what are still unsolved crimes. No other period in our history equals that, so it is not the unusual that he must compare his achievement against. Perhaps it is an acknowledgement of this truth that led the present acting Commissioner of Police on December 12 at the Guyana Police Force annual Christmas Awards ceremony to observe that “the number of murders we have is quite worrying…”
2) The contention that citizens generally do not have a favourable impression of the police force seems to be supported by the revelation made by Chairman of the Police Complaints Authority, Mr Cecil Kennard, who informed us that for the period January to September 2012 there had been a 5% rise in complaints coming to his office as compared to 2011. He went on to reveal that from January to December 2012 “there has been a total of 193 written complaints with an additional 270, which were made over the phone.”
3) Every first year student at the university pursuing a qualification in Sociology knows that today no one who wants to be taken seriously will swear by statistics coming out of police records; they are simply unreliable. I dealt with this before (SN, June 2, 2012), so let me offer one additional example of why police records do not reflect the true level of crime in a country. Imagine someone armed with a knife entering one of our city markets; at knife point he keeps the stallholder at bay, and relieves her of a bag of frozen chicken. The stallholder cries out and the city police arrest the thief even before he is out of the market. However, the stallholder tells the constable that all she wants is her property back, and refuses to press charges, so the constable lets the thief go. Now, it is unlikely that the constable will even go to his office and record this crime, much less formally forward a report to the Guyana Police Force record-keeping department. In other words unless there is tremendous cooperation and coordination in societies in which several agencies have the power of arrest, police records will always be deficient in terms of accurately reflecting the true level of crime.
Another aspect of the Minister’s address that I wish to comment on is his revelation that foreign consultants will be brought in to assist us in crafting an approach for improving our crime-fighting capacity. I commend this decision; however the Minister needs to be reminded that crime-fighting strategies must be influenced by cultural considerations. Having worked with a number of foreign consultants I would ask that the Minister make sure that local consultants be involved. Having foreign consultants merely ‘talk’ with locals who have no authority to influence the final document would be unwise, unproductive and probably of little use. While I am on this issue of foreign consultants let me say this: because the PPP is so incestuous, they refuse to accept that anyone who does not sing their party’s battle song lustily should be involved in our search for solutions to problems confronting the nation. They (the PPP) tend to prefer making appointments of persons from among their own ranks, irrespective of whether those persons have displayed any knowledge or competence to suggest they could possibly do a good job. The appointment of most of the persons to the Broadcasting Authority with Ms Bibi Shadeek as the chairperson is a vivid example of the affinity with poor decision-making that has historically plagued both of our major parties. Hopefully the PPP will take a page from President Obama who is not afraid to appoint persons from the Republican Party to key positions in his administration, once they possess the needed skills. Generally as a people we need to get to a place, in the words of one of Obama’s chief advisers, “where independence is admired and not discouraged.” But such behaviour is only possible in a sane society, and today this blighted society is not sane.
Yours faithfully,
Claudius Prince
