It was on Wednesday that President David Granger told the senior officers of the Guyana Police Force that “Guyanese desire a Force which they can trust,” It was incumbent on the organisation, he said, to ensure that their roles and responsibilities were clearly understood and that every effort was being made to fulfil them. He went on to say: “This profession is based on public trust and without that trust, policing cannot succeed … People want to live in a safe society …”
Guyanese the length and breadth of the land would surely nod their heads in assent, more particularly as the President’s exhortation did not occur in a vacuum. Among all the other challenges which reforming the Force presents, there is one which has arguably done more to undermine public trust than any other, and that is the abuse of power by some members of the GPF, and their concomitant belief that they can act extra-judicially with impunity.
The latest egregious example of this is the case of seventeen-year-old Akshay Budhiram who was allegedly beaten and burnt by two policemen who accused him of breaking into their La Parfaite Harmonie home. It so happens that this house is on the West Bank Demerara, and West Demerara − although the coast this time − was the site of this country’s most notorious teen torture case of recent years. In 2009 a fifteen-year-old was burnt on his genitals by police attached to the Leonora Station who were pursuing an inquiry into the murder of Ramenauth Bisram in Canal No. Two. They had first poured methylated spirits on the teen before setting his genitals alight.
That is not the only case of its kind prior to the present one, and furthermore not the only one where the allegation involved the use of methylated spirits. In 2014, for example, nineteen-year-old Junior Thorrington of Annandale was admitted to the Burn Care Unit in the Georgetown Hospital after alleging that police at Sparendaam on the East Coast had soaked his hands in methylated spirits before setting them on fire. He said that they had then held him in the lock-ups for three days before taking him to the hospital. He had been arrested for loitering.
The allegation in the present case involves not an arrest, but an abduction. Mr Budhiram told this newspaper that he was forcibly taken by a group of eight men in two cars. He alleged that he was transported in the trunk of one car to the policemen’s home where he was tied to a bed, handcuffed, beaten with a shovel and asked about a phone and game they said he had stolen from their house. In echoes of earlier incidents he accused them of burning him with what is presumed to be hot water. He has claimed he has no knowledge of the accusation levelled against him, and if he had, he would have started talking immediately they threw the hot water on him.
Mr Budhiram also alleged that the men threatened to kill him and his family if they reported the matter or took any actions against them, and now that the issue is in the public domain he feels it necessary to sleep away from his home at night. “Them seh anytime me family and them thing go to the station and we go report them, them guh come shoot we,” he told Stabroek News.
It is hardly surprising that the police allegedly involved would not want their actions made public. In Mr Thorrington’s case too they were accused of trying to cover up the alleged torture, and that before they announced an internal investigation had been launched, they allegedly attempted to get Mr Thorrington to forego legal action by paying over the reported sum of $100,000 to a relative. The infamous case of the fifteen-year-old from 2009 conceivably might not have come to public attention so quickly and possibly not at all had it not been for the fact that someone – the person was never identified – visited the teenager’s cell and took a photograph. That photo was then published in the Kaieteur News, and it immediately caused a furore.
In contrast to that case as well as the matter of the nineteen-year-old where the Force appeared reluctant to proceed as it should, the complaint relating to Mr Budhiram was acted on with expedition. The latter’s mother had reported what her son had related to her to the La Parfaite Harmonie Police Station, and this was presumably relayed to the Regional Commander, Assistant Commissioner Simon McBean. The latter then alerted Commissioner of Police Leslie James, who called an emergency press conference to address the issue. He told the media that an investigation had been launched and that it was being spearheaded by a senior member of the Force.
Certainly, this is an improvement on what went before. However, the fact that something like this could still happen ten years after the 2009 criminal assault by members of the GPF on a teenager says nothing for the Police Force as a whole. The report released by the Ministry of Home Affairs after that case said that every effort was being made to ensure there was no repetition of such incidents in the future. No one knows exactly what form that ‘effort’ took. All that can be said is that it was clearly ineffective.
What we are dealing with seems to be a police culture which the hierarchy has had no success in reforming, even if it has genuinely attempted to do so. It is born out of a feeling that police officers are either above the law or are themselves the law, who are entitled to dictate to, intimidate, threaten, and in extreme cases such as those cited above, torture civilians. The bribery and corruption widely associated with sections of the police do not help matters, of course, and contribute to the sense among some ranks that they are not bound by the law. All that the present case of burning illustrates is that Commissioner James and his most senior officers face a systemic problem which will not be solved by lectures or better induction training alone. A more imaginative approach is required, perhaps with specialist advice from those in the field.
