Home Affairs Minister Robeson Benn has rightly ‘called in’ the weapons that had been allowed to the OP Security Service following the fatal shooting of a woman by one of the Com-pany’s security officers. The weapon used in the killing of the young woman is ‘company issued’, a circumstance that makes the incident troubling beyond the deeply distressing killing itself. There used to be a time, not many moons ago, when private security services were few and far between. The services, in those days, were required by a handful of high-profile businessmen and women and families that sought to protect their ‘high end’ homes and their possessions. Most of the assignments requiring some level of security oversight were handled, for the most part, by the Guyana Police Force.
It appeared too, that in those days the Owners/CEO’s of security services possessed a fair level of knowledge of the sector and used their credentials as marketing tools with which to promote what they offered. As the ‘face’ of the country has changed so too, it seems, has the culture of the private security sector. All too frequently there have been reasons to question the ‘credentials’ of emerging security services both from the standpoint of the knowledge/experience in security matters of the individuals ‘heading’ these organizations as well the qualifications of the institutions themselves to provide what one might call a well-schooled security service. Two points should be made at this juncture.
The first is that the rapid (and continuing expansion of the business sector) has increased the need for security services so that while the appearance of new services has been a function of socio-economic transformation, the sector has also come to be seen as a potentially lucrative opportunity for ‘investors’ who were attracted to the financial returns to be had from ‘trying a thing’, as we say in Guyana. The increased challenges confronting a not always effective Police Force these days has also helped to create a space for an enhanced private security sector to take account of the various other socio-economic transformations that are, even now, taking place in the country. Put differently, the relatively rapid growth of the private security sector in recent years has been a function of the increasing expansion of the private sector coupled with the diminished ability of the Guyana Police Force to transform itself into a guard service at the whims of all and sundry.
As it happens, the expansion of the private security sector, however, comes with its own ‘warts and boils,’ some of which have to do with the credentials of some of those institutions. Contemporary security services’ owners own and manage businesses that must, of necessity, embrace, among other things, the control of relatively significant caches of firearms. These services, as well, also carry the ‘burden’ of having to vouch for the character of the ‘security guards,’ some of whom are assigned responsibility for managing lethal weapons. Here it has to be said that not a great deal is known about the various levels of character and competence evaluation which ‘armed guards’ must undergo though it has to be assumed that the process is far more complex than simply ‘weaponizing’ every Tom, Dick and Beharry and placing them at various locations.
Here it has to be said, too, that the relatively recent presence of highly armed uniformed and non-uniformed guards mostly inside and outside Chinese supermarkets across parts of coastal Guyana are not necessarily all that reassuring to patrons. Truth be told, patrons who must, sometimes, endure armed guards, imposingly ‘strapped,’ parading the aisles of supermarkets, might well find the practice a decidedly unwelcome intervention in what has, been, over time, treated as a fairly pleasing routine. The recent incident that resulted in the killing of a female security guard would appear to bring to light patent weaknesses in the protocols that obtain in matters that have to do with both character evaluation and weapons training and use protocols within the organization. Here it has to be said, again, that even in the face of what one assumes are standard protocols that obtain in ‘weapons management,’ it may well be that it was the setting aside of some of those protocols that may have been responsible for the shooting to death of the female security officer.
A decidedly baffling dimension here reposes in the media report that in the face of the seeming setting aside of those protocols associated with the management of weapons by at least two of OP’s security officers, the Home Affairs Minister has, reportedly, limited himself to simply ‘requesting’ that the weapons used by the firm be ‘called in’ following what has been reported in this newspaper of the mishandling of weapons, possibly by at least two security officers attached to OP in the run-up and aftermath of the shooting of the female Guard. Surely, even if one takes the known facts and consequences of the occurrence, not least the killing of a security guard, it would hardly have been inappropriate for the Home Affairs Minister to ask what had become a seriously compromised OP Security Service to (at the very least) suspend its operations pending a thorough investigation into the occurrence.
Regrettably, it took the tragic killing of a young, female security officer to draw attention to some of the pointed weaknesses of private security services in Guyana. Since one can safely assume that these services are likely to be increasingly pressed into service with the expansion of the country’s business sector, there can hardly be a more appropriate junction at which to launch an official probe into the operations of privately run security services particularly where the recent tragic incident is not the first occurrence and that which has given rise to a worrying level of concern about the operations of some of these establishments. The ball is now sitting in the court of Minister Robeson Benn.
