The protests about Police behaviour in the US following their cold-blooded murder of George Floyd have stirred interest in the field of “legal cynicism”. It is mainly concerned with the cynicism certain communities develop as they interact with the legal system, primarily the Police and the lower courts, which are supposed to deliver justice but rarely do. It has been referred to by one of its pioneers as “anomie about the law”.
Most of the studies focus on individuals in the communities and the factors that shape their attitudes about the law and Police, and why some deny the binding nature of laws. While these issues are also germane to what we experience in Guyana, what has occurred over the course of the last five years under the government of the APNU/AFC coalition has offered us an insight into the system itself – especially the institutions of the Police and the Courts – to consider what might be generating the actions from the top that are creating cynicism in the minds of the populace.
We can begin with the Police. While the two parties stridently criticised the previous PPP regime for alleged Police brutality, and Granger indulged in a massive shakeup of the Police top brass, the courts refused to deal with both contingent and systemic factors that might have affected Police behaviour. For instance, while there have been accusations that the Police were used to kill individuals in an ethnically-directed manner, there has been total silence on the known facts that three dozen Policemen were gunned down by gangs during the politically- directed killing spree that had its epicentre in Buxton. This has engendered a great deal of cynicism in communities that were at the receiving end of the violence that was terroristically directed at them in order to bring down the PPP administration.
Another cynicism-generator has been the refusal of the Granger Administration to follow the recommendation of the Disciplined Forces Commission, on which he sat as the PNC’s representative, to make the Police Force more representative of the country’s ethnically diverse population. In all jurisdictions, especially in the US and UK, it has been recognised that one of the main factors that create legal cynicism in minority communities is this exact lack of representativeness, which led to the Police not empathising with those communities.
During the PNC’s first and long iteration in government between 1964 and 1992, the entire Police Force and all the other Disciplined Forces had been politicised by the PNC. The dictator Burnham insisted that all officers attend the PNC’s Biennial Congresses and swear personal loyalty and fealty to him. David Granger was the officer who was in charge of promulgating this philosophy in the Forces, and we can discern these tendencies in the present, with him as president. The differential treatment of protestors from the PPP (in front of the Foreign Ministry) and of the PNC (in New Amsterdam, Georgetown and Linden) against the COVID-19 regime betrays the present politicisation. This was also evident when media personnel in front of GECOM were harassed by PNC supporters.
But there is another set of actions by the PNC that are generating legal cynicism even more invidiously, and at such a level that threatens the viability of our entire national edifice. That is: the refusal of the APNU/AFC leaders to abide by the internal rules of the system. The precedent was set in the government of Forbes Burnham, back in the 1970s, when he went as far as to have his most trenchant critic, Walter Rodney, assassinated by a member of the GDF.
He also directly interfered with the operations of the Elections Commission and the Judiciary, which we see being repeated in the present with Granger’s efforts to rig the elections to remain in power at all costs. At that time, the Elections Commission was spineless, unlike in the present, with Claudette Singh at the helm. The Judiciary had luminaries like JOF Haynes who also held the line. May his successors be as “fit and proper” to let Guyana breathe.
