It would appear that Guyana is not the only CARICOM country where the costs associated with repairing police vehicles damaged and disabled on account of accidents – many of which result from reckless driving or mechanical defects due to drivers’ road-handling skills – continue to impose a considerable strain on the public purse.
A report by the Trinidad Guardian last week provided details of the extent of the state’s indebtedness to various garages and repair shops across the country arising out of the costs associated with effecting repairs to vehicles used by the T&T Police Force. According to the report the amounts owing to various privately-run repair shops for repairing damaged or defective police vehicles amounts to TT$40 million. The indebtedness, the T&T media report says, is spread across more than twenty garages and repair shops, compelling them to close their doors over the past six weeks and pushing more than 100 persons onto the breadline.
Recognising that information pertaining to what it costs taxpayers to keep police vehicles in service is unlikely to emanate from functionaries who may have such data at their disposal, the Stabroek Business sought the assistance of two serving members of the Force who drive police vehicles, to speak ‘off the record’ about the local situation.
During separate conversations the two confirmed that, as is the case in Trinidad and Tobago, the Guyana Police Force uses workshops across the country to render and repair its vehicles, a logistical consideration that has to do with the dispersed nature of the institution.
While neither of our two informants could provide even a remote estimate of the costs associated with repairing and rendering vehicles belonging to the GPF, both agreed that it would be fair to say that those costs run into the “millions.” What they also both agreed on, however, was that there are cases in which privately operated service facilities would be required to wait for unspecified periods for payment.
Interestingly enough, the most important concern of the report emanating from Trinidad and Tobago has do with the impact of those substantial and as yet unpaid debts on the well-being of the owners of the privately-run mechanical and body restoration shops pressed into service to render the damaged and defective vehicles and who, presumably, must ‘grin and bear it’ until the police pay up.
The GPF is usually not inclined to wash what might be described as its dirty linen in public, but a few mechanics and bodywork men here, who have worked for the police rendering or repairing defective or damaged vehicles were willing to share their experiences with us. Their responses, in summary were, “Yes, we have worked on police vehicles, yes, there are times when payments took a while but these jobs bring in good money.”
Here in Guyana, accidents and consequential damage to police vehicles often arise out of emergency response circumstances where, perhaps, drivers may be inclined to throw caution to the wind.
In October, Public Works Minister Juan Edghill used a local road safety forum to draw attention to what he described as “the amount of emergency vehicles … such as ambulances, fire and police vehicles” that continue to be involved in accidents. These accidents, one of our two police informants told us, frequently result in vehicle ‘write offs’, which in effect means that vehicles involved in such accidents are damaged beyond repair. This circumstance, he explained, accounts for the frequent presence in some police station compounds of police vehicles that are seemingly abandoned having been seriously damaged in road accidents. A Commission of Inquiry into a horrific October 2019 accident involving a police car and another vehicle at Friendship on the East Bank Demerara and which claimed the lives of five persons, concluded that the speeding police car was largely responsible for the accident.
While loss of life and injury tend, understandably, to be the focus of attention when such accidents occur, in the final analysis repair and write-off costs cannot be overlooked. In November 2018 the GPF carried out an inspection of a large fleet of vehicles gifted to Guyana by the Chinese Government a year earlier. While the headline in a subsequent story in the Stabroek News declared that the fleet was “in order,” our police informants told the Stabroek Business that some of the vehicles had been involved in accidents within weeks of them being handed over.
There exists a widespread opinion here in Guyana that drivers of police vehicles are not amongst the most mindful drivers in the country and reports of accidents involving such vehicles usually come with such details as vehicles crashing into bridges and running off the roads, among other accounts, suggesting that speed and recklessness might well be high on the list of the causes of these accidents.
Frankly, the Stabroek Business didn’t bother trying to secure from the GPF a comparable figure for the annual cost to the public treasury associated with police vehicles damaged (or written off) in accidents. A dead giveaway in terms of the toll which it takes is to be seen in the number of seriously damaged vehicles ‘stashed’ for protracted periods on the premises of various police stations.
People talk, however, and we were able to get something out of the owner of a city repair shop – which, thankfully, is still, unlike its counterpart repair shops in Port-of-Spain, very much in business. Unsurprisingly, it is really a matter of the police not being treated like what the owner of the Shop calls “the average customer”. Sometimes, the damage is done, the repairs are effected and that is pretty much the end of that.
In Trinidad and Tobago, where reports indicate that the authorities have been somewhat more forthcoming with information, the impact of the reduced ability of privately-run service shops to operate effectively appears to have meant that hundreds of police vehicles have been left inoperable, lying both in the yards of police stations and in various private repair yards across the country. The article seen by this newspaper that addresses the state of the indebtedness lists various amounts owing to various spare parts merchants and service shops amounting to tens of millions of dollars. The T&T Police Force reportedly owes TT$154 million for vehicle repair, parts and services.
