The week before last a 37-year-old Wismar man, Leonard Moriah, died from injuries he had received from the residents of Block 22 who had caught him in the act of robbing someone’s house. In addition to the beating, he also was involved in a scuffle as a consequence of which he sustained a gunshot wound, although the Commander of E Division Linden Lord told Stabroek News that the autopsy showed the cause of death to have been blunt trauma to the head and abdomen. After the beating the police had been called, and Mr Moriah had been transferred to the hospital; however, he subsequently died there.
While episodes of vigilante ‘justice’ in the immediate past are not as frequent as they had been a little earlier, they are still far from being rare. As we have commented many times before, they are symptomatic of the ineffectualness of the police force. In the past few years there have been incidents in Pearl on the East Bank, Enterprise and North Ruimveldt, with a particularly brutal example in Sophia. In the case of vigilantism in Canal No One Polder, two victims of a beating who had been accused of stealing rearview mirrors, which they denied, complained to the police.
Public Security Minister Khemraj Ramjattan and Police Commissioner Leslie James have been at pains to insist recently that crime is not as serious as is being claimed. The problem is no one believes them, especially those living on the Corentyne where there have been a spate of armed robberies in recent times. Scepticism about police assurances that crime is decreasing spans the entire society, from the small man and woman to the more affluent ones.
The business community in particular remains unpersuaded, and on Wednesday the Private Sector Commission issued a statement saying it was worried about the crime situation and was seeking a meeting with the Minister and Commissioner. “The Commission is deeply concerned that insufficient progress is being made with regards to the implementation of Security Sector Reform,” it said.
Messrs Ramjattan and James do not appear to understand that people come to judgements about their safety, not on the basis of statistics released by the police force showing some modest numerical decline in the overall number of crimes committed, but on their experience of what is going on around them. And in this age of the universality of news, it makes no difference if, say, the East Coast is experiencing fewer robberies, as long as the Corentyne appears to be under siege. The sentiment is that today it is the Corentyne and next month it might be Georgetown or Essequibo or somewhere else.
Furthermore, the population is not so naïve as to believe that armed robbery is going to be curbed easily when guns are so ubiquitous in the society. That said, it might be observed, however, that vigilantism is not a problem where the bandits carry high-powered weapons. The sad truth of the matter is that small-time criminals are far more at risk from vigilantes simply because they do not have guns, Mr Moriah being a case in point.
Where heavily armed robbers are concerned, homeowners and business proprietors have to rely wholly on the GPF, and the fact that police responses to attacks have been notoriously slow in many instances, does not redound to any feeling of security on the part of the public. If the police do not respond with any promptitude to major invasions by bandits, the assumption is that they will not bestir themselves in the case of small-time operators. Exasperated residents in such circumstances then feel justified in taking ‘justice’ into their own hands.
There have been occasions in the past when the police have complained that they could not take on bandits because they were outgunned. Certainly one wonders why the upper echelons of the police force have not made it a major priority to try and stop so many firearms from coming into the country, and especially to prevent assault rifles from falling into the hands of criminals. Two weeks ago, however, following the spate of Corentyne robberies, the police shot dead three armed robbery suspects in a confrontation in Black Bush Polder. While this earned them plaudits from Corentyne residents and the PSC, unanswered questions relating to the operation still linger. Certainly one doesn’t want a return to the era of extra-judicial killings which had characterised the administration of Mr Bharrat Jagdeo, any more than one wants to encourage vigilantism at the community level. Apart from being illegal, they are both reflective in their different ways of a police force failure.
