The police and the public

For as long as the issue of law and order, in all of its various facets, remains a national challenge – and this has unquestionably been the case for several years now – those institutions that are responsible for ensuring that the peace is kept and the law upheld will come under public scrutiny. That is as it should be, though the Guyana Police Force (GPF) is often inclined to think that the police are entitled to immunity from public criticism.

The case for the argument that the public should go easy on the Force is built on the notion that policemen and women are the law rather than instruments of the law. As such, those who subscribe to that view are inclined to make the point, often in various intimidating, often brutal ways. We have grown entirely accustomed to seeing the police behave as the law unto themselves and altogether without any restraint. The point is sometimes made too that the police do their best in a bad situation as if, somehow, that entitles them to forgiveness every time they fall short of expectations.

The view has been represented that while criticisms of the Police Force might be true, they are somehow cancelled out by the nature and circumstances of policing, which entitle the police to the commission of what one might describe as certain indiscretions, without any sort of reprimand. Some officers may espouse the view that the culture of corruption which informs the relationship between some traffic cops and delinquent motorists is “really too small a matter” for the Force to concern itself with, given all of the various other challenges facing it. However, that is just the thin edge of a wedge which leads to protection rackets and aiding and abetting major criminal pursuits.

What might arguably be perceived as relatively small indiscretions in some police quarters, have not only had a cumulative effect on the image of the Force but more tellingly, have resulted in a terrible loss of face (and trust) amongst the citizenry and have ultimately made the task of law enforcement doubly difficult.

Far more worrying is the fact that the Force has been decidedly indifferent in its efforts to regain that public trust. Indeed, if anything, it appears to have placed itself at odds with the citizenry as a whole, causing them (the citizens) to have to bear witness to a host of examples of heavy-handed, often decidedly extra-judicial acts that pass as policing. In this regard, the Force appears to have adopted a sort of go-it-alone mentality, as if the enforcement of the law somehow, has nothing to do with the right of citizens to pass judgment. It is this notion that is largely responsible for the extremes – like killing squads and torture – to which the police have resorted, for which the Force has paid a high price and from which it simply must retreat.

Of course, it can only do so when upward mobility in the Force ceases to be determined through a combination of an altogether irrational process of attrition and political preference, circumstances which appear to have led to a fair measure of bellyaching in the wake of the recent round of police promotions. What our political culture has done to the Force is to cause it to fail to arrive at that point where it responds to professional rather than political imperatives so that there appears to be no vision for a GPF that sees the citizenry as a stakeholder in the business of law enforcement.

It is little wonder then that those exercises that are proffered by the Force as community-based and designed to build bridges not only have an undertone of insincerity about them but lack sustainability. What the leadership of the Force appears not to realize is that police-community initiatives can only be successfully built on a foundation of a measure of trust, and the trust has to come first. The truth of the matter is that the Force has earned itself a combative relationship with the citizenry which can only be remedied by structured corrective measures which the Force is both unable and seemingly disinclined to deliver at this time.

Time and again the argument has been made about the operational limitations of the Force as it pertains to men and equipment, an argument that overlooks the reality that the effectiveness of law enforcement reposes in the keeping of the peace so that however much the police continue to rely on what they see as their monopoly of force as the ultimate arbiter in their law-enforcement pursuits, they ignore the role of the citizenry in keeping the peace at their own peril. Heavy-handedness will only get the police so far.

In the years since it has had to confront critical public scrutiny the Force has made no significant attempt to undertake any planned and sustained image-enhancing programme designed to regain the trust and confidence of communities across the country. Community policing may have been proffered as an exercise on the part of the police to embrace communities as stakeholders in the law-enforcement process. That, however, in large measure, has become discredited, seen in some quarters as an avenue for the selective allocation of firearm licences. That is how deep-seated the mistrust has gone. That is far from fertile ground for effective policing, however much we delude ourselves to the contrary.