It was always likely that the widely expected appointment of recently promoted Deputy Com-missioner of Police Mr. Clifton Hicken, to act as Commissioner, would trigger a flurry of political and public chatter. That such a circumstance has unfailingly manifested itself is a reflection of the eternal and frankly unwholesome dilemma in which the Guyana Police Force is caught fast.
The word had been ‘doing the rounds’ for some time now that Mr. Hicken was the incumbent political administration’s ‘pick’ to eventually take over as Acting Commissioner upon the previous Acting Commissioner, Mr. Nigel Hoppie, proceeding on a lengthy period of earned leave. Apart from a certain level of public and political pouting over the idea of Mr. Hicken occupying the position, another retired Assistant Commis-sioner of Police, Clinton Conway also went public with the position that if rank and seniority were to remain the critical criteria for preferment then Mr. Hicken should not, rightly, occupy the Commissioner’s chair in an acting capacity once Mr. Nigel Hoppie had proceeded on pre-retirement leave.
That the appointment of every new Commis-sioner of Police, acting or otherwise, has, for several years now, been attended by a certain level of public ‘hum’ is a reflection of a reality that continues to be decidedly awkward for a Police Force whose officially designated mandate is the unpre-judiced pursuit of a law enforcement regime from which all sections of the society should anticipate equal measures of service and protection. This, in reality has not been the case. The complexities that arise out of a circumstance in which a national Police Force must, simultaneously, serve, the masters of both unprejudiced law enforcement and allegiance to the imperatives of a political master, saddles the Force with an unbearable balancing act out of which no lasting good can come.
Perhaps more to the point, such a circumstance is a guaranteed recipe for a Police Force that stands, permanently on a precipice of a dysfunctional condition that can have the most worrisome public security considerations. This is precisely why the admonitions periodically leveled at the Force by the political directorate are no more than exercises in the most grotesque hypocrisy.
The political and public squalls that have attended Mr. Hicken’s appointment, now seem set to persist at various levels. The political directorate’s Attorney General has pronounced pointedly on what he deems to be the constitutional correctness of Mr. Hicken’s appointment and that pronouncement has been attended by a public see-you-in-court notification from the PNCR. Were that state of affairs to proceed to a logical conclusion then the Force could find itself in a circumstance that is bound to distract from its overarching law enforcement obligations. Here, both its professional judgement and its response capabilities could become compromised by the burden of prejudices that can erode or, at best, constrain its professional decision-making obligations. This has been known to occur previously even in the absence of the prevailing brouhaha over the Hicken appointment.
Nor has it taken any time for the newly designated Acting Commissioner of Police to ‘shuffle the pack,’ at the leadership level below him, a development which, one expects, would have had to have secured the imprimatur of the political powers that be. Here, there is the clear and present risk of a transformed operational and decision-making status quo within the Force that could well have implications which can generate disquieting levels of public and political pushback that create further challenges for an already seriously hobbled Guyana Police Force.
The whole affair raises disturbing questions as to whether the GPF will be among those national institutions to benefit from a makeover that is in step with the envisaged wider transformation expected to derive from the country’s oil and gas aspirations, or whether we are likely to see a Police Force whose sails becomes even more firmly fixed to the mast of those who rule.
