Minister of Home Affairs, Robeson Benn, has just announced that the Guyana Police Force (GPF) would be issued with pepper spray and tasers to deal with civilians. This followed a video that went viral, which showed that, following a policeman snatching a cell phone from the hands of a pedestrian who was filming him, a scuffle followed, in which the policeman got as good (bad?) as he gave. For good measure, the melee widened as a friend of the pedestrian ripped into a second policeman, who was trying to aid his colleague. It then remained a fair fight!!
While the minister conceded that the police have no right to be snatching people’s phones – cause THEY have the right to be filming them – he justified his move by pointing out that police in other jurisdictions also carry pepper spray and tasers. Well, sure they do; but, in England, the police don’t carry guns, and only those police who’re TRAINED to use tasers are issued them!! The minister seems to be influenced by the American experience – where tasers and sprays are very common.
But, as in all things, we can’t just say that “others are doing it, and so should we”! We gotta compare their contexts with ours. Our Police Force was formed right after the abolition of slavery, and was deliberately NOT modelled on the English Metropolitan – where the police carried no guns, but just a baton. They developed the friendly “bobby on the beat”, who pinched kids’ cheeks as he kept them out of trouble. WE, instead, followed the Irish Constabulary, who were armed to the teeth to keep down those pesky Irish who resented being starved to death during their potato famine!!
So, our police were issued with guns from their beginning, to keep those African folks who resented having to work for free on the plantations as slaves!! The nerve!!! It meant that OUR police didn’t pinch no kid’s cherubic cheeks, but punched our citizens’ teeth out when they weren’t shooting them in the back! In a word, our police were socialised to use force on civilians, and they’ve been doing so with gusto over the past couple hundred years!!
So, your Eyewitness has a couple of suggestions for the Minister Benn. Firstly, before issuing those tasers, get the policemen who’ll be using them TRAINED!! Zapping rather than cuffing folks in the face ain’t no improvement. From what we’ve seen up to now, whenever the police get another tool, they use it as a toy to punish civvies.
Secondly – and most importantly – police must be trained to actually practise their motto – TO SERVE AND PROTECT the people of this country, who pay their salaries.
And not just the BIG ONES!!
…the world order
Your Eyewitness is gonna return to this theme frequently; cause, as they say, when the countries up north cough, WE catch cold!! And boy, are they coughing – and sputtering!! – as Trump upends the OLD order. And don’t think this will end with the Ukraine War and the US slapping tariffs on products from what soon might be “former friends”. This goes to the heart of the entire “state system” that’s been with us for almost four hundred years – wherein Europe then defined countries where the people within that country were all supposed to be “one” – a nation!!
And spread it worldwide with their conquests!! Trouble is…folks in what preceded those “countries” had defined themselves by their cultures etc. And this created a situation as to which group’s culture in a country would be the standard for the rest. After three hundred years or so, some of the European countries – and the US – conceded that maybe they should be “multicultural” and accept everyone’s culture.
But that’s gone in the new world!!
…oil supply
Remember the band “Air Supply” and their mega-hit “All out of love”?? Well, looks like things are reversed, and we now have a mega problem with “Oil Supply” refusing to fulfil the prediction “All out of oil”!!
