In the wake of the March 19 fatal shooting of a female security guard by a male colleague attached to the same security service, telephone exchanges with a more than twenty five (25) persons of all walks of life and residing primarily in Region Four are of the view that there may be need for stricter ‘gun controls’ and that such controls should extend to registered security services.
More than 70% of persons told the Stabroek Business that security guards doing duty at shops (mostly Chinese-run shops) ought not to be allowed to carry what one interviewee described as “menacing-looking automatic weapons” whilst patrolling the isles of supermarkets where shoppers are going about their business. Are we to assume that a shoplifter, who tries to make off with a can of sardines might be executed on the premises, the interviewee, a retired Rural Constable inquired? In the course of the interviews which lasted over four days, a recurring concern among informants was that the ‘qualifications’ for the establishment of a security service may well have been compromised in some instances, and that there are ‘probably many instances’ in which persons functioning as security guards might not have been subjected to background checks.
Meanwhile, a retired Customs Officer told the Stabroek Business that he believed that security-related protocols in Guyana has been “eroded to a point where the authority of the Guyana Police Force had become ‘seriously compromised… in this country you get what you want if you are sufficiently well-connected.’” Of the seven women who agreed to speak to the Stabroek Business, five said that the sight of heavily armed security guards is usually an intimidating factor rather than a worrying effect, and all seven wondered aloud about the wisdom of using what one of them described as “big guns” (automatic weapons) as a deterrent inside relatively cramped supermarkets where the use of such guns could very well create mayhem.
Asked to provide recommendations for the “clearing” of applications for the establishing of security services, fourteen (14) of the interviewees recommended that the first response to such applications should be to conduct a thorough check in the backgrounds of the lead functionaries in the intended new security service. And agreeing that the circumstances under which the female security guard lost her life were “tragic”, the former Customs Officer said that what was clear was that there appeared to be no “clearly laid down procedures” within the security service on the matter of the management of weapons. What the report on the incident clearly says is that the ‘trigger man’ in the incident did not appear to have clearance to possess the weapon with which the female security guard was killed.
