Dear Editor,
The Guyana Police Force is responding to an article published in the Kaieteur News of Tuesday April 15, 2014, under the heading ‘Confusion rages over anti-kidnapping unit,’ in order to clarify what acting Commissioner of Police Mr Seelall Persaud, actually said.
The article quoted the acting Commissioner as saying that the Police Force’s approach was to have several persons trained and whenever there is a kidnapping, those officers who were trained would pool ideas to address the situation, which is incorrect. What the acting Commissioner said is that a team will be pulled from those trained officers and will investigate the kidnapping under the leadership of the officer in charge of the Criminal Investigation Department (Crime Chief). There is a material difference between “pooling ideas” and “investigating.”
Further, the Guyana Police Force wishes to say that there is no confusion about a kidnapping unit in the Force. The Guyana Police Force does not have a permanent kidnapping unit because it sees the demand for such a unit as being very low, given that over the last five years there were two such reports in 2009, two in 2010, one in 2011, and none in 2012 and 2013.
Should a permanent kidnapping unit be in place, it will be highly under-utilised and therefore the posture of the Guyana Police Force is to have a number of ranks undergo specialised training and whenever there is an incident, a team/unit is mobilised to investigate under the leadership of the Crime Chief.
The team/unit is deactivated after the investigations are completed, and the ranks return to their respective permanent deployment.
Yours faithfully,
Ivelaw Whittaker
Public Relations
and Press Officer
