This newspaper’s allusion to the barefaced `shakedowns’ and various other pockets of shocking lawlessness that obtain in traffic administration in its Tuesday, August 29 editorial (‘Going with the flow) was by no means an attempt to hold the Guyana Police Force (GPF) up to public ridicule.
One recognizes and respects the challenges facing a Force that must pursue law enforcement in a country not disinclined to slip into pockets of ‘loose’ behaviour that has proven to be much easier to cultivate than to break.
Only the less than open-minded amongst us would deny that a Guyana Police Force possessed of a host of ‘warts and worries’ becomes a serious impediment to ‘growth and development,’ oil and gas notwithstanding. Perhaps, more to the point, it does not appear as though any serious and, equally importantly, sustained attempt has been made to bring about a turnaround in the situation.
Quite to the contrary it often appears as though the Force is a law onto itself and that its operations are driven by a momentum that lacks the oversight of a strong guiding hand.
In matters of traffic administration, for example, it would be foolish, no less, to ignore the fact that this pursuit has drifted into a realm of shocking lawlessness, some of the manifestations of which were set out in this newspaper’s August 29 editorial.
Here, the disease of shameful shakedowns of road users has become sufficiently ingrained as to leave little doubt that it has become an infectious disease that goes way beyond the delinquency of a clutch of traffic ranks ‘looking for it’ as we say in Guyana. The evidence of this is simply too blatant to ignore.
It is, to an overwhelming extent, this callous disregard for the strict enforcement of rules, one feels, that is, in large measure, responsible for the truly shocking state in which our traffic administration regime finds itself.
Not only is the Force not providing persuasive evidence that it is aware of the road use crisis that we face and is prepared. To the contrary, there exists easily available evidence that its own modus operandi is, unquestionably, a substantial part of the problem.
Many of us have actually experienced, personally, or else, witnessed, directly, road users perceived to be delinquent in terms of one or another traffic regulation being put through regimes of intense extortion. The practice is known to occur both in bilateral engagements between transgressors and individual traffic ranks as well as in circumstances where more senior officers appear to be ‘directing’ structured roadblocks where the shakedowns are systematically applied. Not only are these practices too blatant, too open for the leadership of the Force to persuasively deny, they also defy belief that these daily and numerous instances of extortion do not ever come to the attention of the high command of the Force or even the Minister of Home Affairs. Which is why, these days being assigned ‘traffic’ duties is reportedly a privilege for which some sort of payback is expected of the benefactor. Here, reportedly, it is the potential the ‘Traffic’ provides for blatant extortion rather than concerns over considerations of enforcement that is the driving factor.
The sight of eagle-eyed motorcycled policemen, ‘hunting in pairs,’ cruising down quiet streets (not busy highways), armed with a hosts of pretexts that can transform even the slightest infraction into ‘lef a raise’ discourses has become par for the course in parts of coastal Guyana. But that is not all. There are stories being bandied about (to which the Stabroek News has previously referred) about ‘arrangements’ that tie some minibus operators and traffic ranks to seamy deals with ‘upstairs’ operators in the Force from which both sides benefit, the former enjoying the prerogative of effecting the ‘shakedowns’ and the latter providing ‘cover’ in return for a consideration.
There can be no question that traffic management anomalies rank among the decidedly ‘low-hanging’ fruit that continue to bring the Force in disrepute. The primary issue here is the seeming shocking indifference on the parts of either the Police Force’s ‘high command’ or the political administration, to intervene to expunge the Force of these irregularities that continue to bring it into disrepute.
The dimensions of utter lawlessness that frequently pass for a normal regime of traffic administration is much (not all, but much) of what continues to drag the Force to hell in terms of its public image.
What makes the numerous warts that characterize traffic administration particularly damaging for the Force is that the traffic management-related irregularities that are now an integral part of its operational operandi are exerting a powerful impact on the image of the Force as a whole. What we need to remember here is that diminished respect for the Force in any aspect of its operations amounts to an institutional compromise that will ultimately impact (maybe it already has) on the country’s public security regime, as a whole, since whether it be traffic or any other aspect of policing it is the public perception of the integrity of the Force that counts.
