Last week, the Guyana Police Force (GPF) observed its 182nd anniversary, marking it as one of the oldest institutions in Guyana. It is the most visible and ubiquitous symbol of the State, reinforcing the latter’s definition as possessing the legitimate authority to use force against citizens – even of killing them. The GPF was founded in 1839, after the abolition of slavery – just a decade after the launching of the London Metropolitan Police Force.
It was the model for British Police, with a decentralised structure to ensure that local sentiments and concerns were addressed. Most of the Force was unarmed, up to the present. The emphasis of the British Police was to protect the British citizenry. In their definition of the duty of the Police, “to maintain law and order”, their Police’s imperative was to uphold the law.
The British view of the role of the Police in its colonies, however, was the opposite to the above stance. Here, their prime concern was to maintain “order” to protect British interests and they organised the Police Forces here appropriately. Ordinance 13 of 1838 had originally established the Guyana Police Force patterned on the London Metropolitan Police, but after Governor Henry Light (and the Secretary of the State for the Colonies) learnt of the innovations of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) formed in 1836 to keep the Irish in line, they switched course and came up with Ordinance #9 of 1839.
The RIC was very centralised, heavily armed and ethnicised. That is, it consisted mostly of Irish Protestants and English Officers, to ensure the imposition of draconian order against the predominantly Catholic population. The focus of the Irish Police was to maintain order, ie to protect the security of the State against a citizenry that was considered rebellious and recalcitrant. The GPF was explicitly organised in the Irish tradition.
It is noteworthy that the present motto of the GPF, “To Serve and Protect” was not adopted until over a hundred years after its formation: the British were clearly not moved to “serve and protect” the newly-freed slaves. The early recruits were primarily Barbadians who had migrated for higher wages here. This was to ensure that orders from the ruling Whites and their planters to use force on the newly-freed slaves would not be disobeyed, out of sympathy for “kith and kin”. That the same technique was utilised on the Irish showed that “control”, not race, was the prime motivation.
The GPF imitated the Irish Police’s highly-centralised command structure to deal with anticipated uprisings from the local Africans. The British had honed their “divide and rule” policy to a tee. When the ex-slaves proved compliant to the new order, and indentured labourers were brought in to replace them on the plantations, the latter were deemed to be posing a threat, purportedly because of the cutlasses in their possession.
The local Africans were then recruited into the GPF to deal with the new “threat” and set into motion a historical discrimination against Indian recruitment that continues into the present. The British used various stratagems to exclude Indians from the GPF. In Guyana, “minimum physical requirements” of height, weight, chest measurement; food (serving beef and pork); religious proscriptions (against Hinduism and Islam) and being unmarried were some of the prime mechanisms. These supposedly facially neutral factors, not formally changed until 1968 (under duress) by the People’s National Congress (PNC), produced a disparate impact on Indians and ensured their minimal enlistment. An ICJ Commission of Inquiry in 1965, as a precondition for independence, recommended affirmative action hiring practices for raising the percentage of Indian Guyanese, but this was never implemented, even as the PNC massively expanded the GPF. Adding to the centralised, para-militarised and ethnicised disabilities of the GPF, the PNC also deprofessionalised it by insisting that it be subservient to its whims and fancies.
For the last three decades Guyana has suffered from the systemic effects of those disabilities.
