ROAR was launched on January 17th 1999 asking citizens to, “Rise, Organise And Rally” against crime and violence. Twenty-five years later, what has changed? One of the points we made then was that while like all other societies Guyana had its share of people who will break the law and use violence, here, there was inevitably a political relation to aspects of that crime and violence. The “Choke-and-rob” of the sixties, the “kick-down-the door” banditry of the late seventies and eighties, the high-intensity violent “urban-guerrilla’ tactics in robberies and kidnapping of the nineties, the “African Resistance” and the Death Squads “Phantoms” of the millennium decade all sketch the increasingly open political nature of our crime and violence.
Many persons (then and later) resisted our linkage between politics, crime and violence even though we made what we thought was an elementary logical inference: if our politics had a nexus with race/ethnicity (and very few disputed this assertion) then inevitably the crime and violence would refract that connection, politically. Many reacted emotionally to our analysis and saw us creating, “guilty races” who had some ontological connection to violence even though we had explicitly disavowed such a position.
The conclusion we drew then that, and we would like to repeat now, was that if one agrees with our premise then one would have to also accept that any attempt to deal with our escalating wave of crime and violence must have a political impact. We cannot ignore the maxim that “a political problem must have a political solution.”
I have said previously that at independence we inherited a state but not a nation and that that circumstance had presented us with a host of problems. But the truth is that the authoritarian colonial state we inherited has posed as grave a set of (not necessarily unconnected) problems as the lack of a “national” identity.
Take the Guyana Police Force (GPF), which is the most visible (and coercive) arm of the state to most citizens. All accept today that this institution must be changed but few are prepared to make the radical changes necessary to deal with our post-colonial situation.
When PPP presidents railed against the ineffectualness of the GPF to deal with the escalating violent crisis precipitated by the attacks against the state and innocent citizens, they missed the point: the Police Force itself was part of the problem. The fact is, the GPF was founded as a pacification “force” for the colonial masters to deal with a post-slavery potentially restive population: nothing has been done to change its modus operandi since then. In fact its authoritarian nature was exacerbated under the Burnham regime and continued with the Black Clothes unit under the PPP. The GPF will have to be completely revamped to become of any positive consequence now.
In 1999 we had called for the GPF to be professionalised by “streamlining it, decentralising it and balancing it”. Essentially, this called for removing many extraneous tasks such as “vehicle fitness” and immigration that had little to do with police work; breaking the unified command and control structure that was intended to facilitate the colonial imperative for control and making it more responsive to local needs, and finally and most importantly, ensuring that the composition of the GPF reflect the general population breakdown of the country.
Radical decentralisation, of course, facilitates the last imperative, with the least disruption. Interestingly, the Disciplined Forces Report, tabled in Parliament in May 2004 and approved in 2010, incorporates many recommendations that form an excellent starting point for a more effective GPF. The report has unfortunately, for all intent and purposes, been buried.
We also repeated our 1999 call for the top COP’s replacement to be from abroad – and not only to address concerns about modern know-how and competency. The nexus between politics and race/ethnicity and crime mirrors the nexus between politics and race/ethnicity and almost all major activities and institutions in our country: and our Police Force is no exception.
Any serious effort to professionalise the GPF cannot sweep these facts under any rug.
