– McCormack tells annual officers conference
Human rights activist Mike McCormack says the Guyana Police Force (GPF) needs a democratic orientation which will transform its negative image and prise it away from the militaristic way it is viewed by society.
Addressing last week’s annual officers conference, McCormack, Co-President of the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA), noted that efforts around a decade ago to transform the image of the GPF were not sustained and he set out a new pathway that should be followed.
The first principle of democratic policing was what McCormack des-cribed as `downward responsiveness’ to the public rather than `upward responsiveness’ to the political regime.
“The monolithic political control exercised by the Minister of Home Affairs – as currently empowered by the Police Act – is inappropriate for accounting more flexibly to the multiple audiences to which they (the police) are accountable, namely Parliament, the media, the judiciary, complaints mechanisms and local communities. In other words the principle of
