Police must rebuild trust, improve accountability – Jagdeo

The Guyana Police Force (GPF) must urgently rebuild public trust and strengthen accountability, says Vice President (VP) Dr Bharrat Jagdeo, who also criticised the organisation for failing to highlight its many untold success stories. Speaking during an episode of the Starting Point podcast on Tuesday, Jagdeo said there are two main issues surrounding the GPF: a perception problem and an accountability issue. These, the VP argues, overshadow the many successes of the GPF.

“When we look at the statistics on solving crime in Guyana, we’ve done an excellent job. The training and the tools available to the Police Force to do their job, investigative work, has grown immensely. They don’t speak enough of that success. Because the Police Force doesn’t hold a press conference. And that is an accountability issue. I believe that they’ve had bad press on some things and they’re worried that they’ll go to a press conference and those issues will dominate,” Jagdeo explained. “But they need to talk about the enormous success they’ve had in these five years across the country in solving crime and bringing perpetrators to justice and keeping our people safe. And there have been many, many successes. And we have a lot of great police officers who’ve done good work, hard work and sometimes unrecognised work,” he added.
In fact, Jagdeo revealed that the success of the GPF rivals other policing organisations in the Caribbean. He revealed that “I was talking to someone from Trinidad and Tobago, a Guyanese who came home and he said, our Police Force here is like the FBI to the Trinidad Police Force…in terms of solving crime and tackling the level of crime. But that doesn’t get spoken about.”

Nonetheless, the VP admitted that the GPF needs to strengthen accountability.
“The accountability problem, they have a few of these issues and these overshadow everything else…and often the Government gets blamed for it.” For example, he referred to the Adrianna Younge case. “When someone lied about seeing that child leaving…and that caused a whole deal of problem. They should have come out immediately and said, ‘this is not true. It’s not true’. They come up with all sorts of rigmarole and then people started not trusting them,” Jagdeo said.
Meanwhile, the VP noted that another issue surrounds police officers’ conduct on the roadways. While acknowledging that a lot of citizens disobey road regulations, he noted that road users too are often subjected to unnecessary harassment by police officers. “A lot of madness takes place on the road. But they, in some cases, the police contribute to this and we need greater accountability,” Jagdeo said.
To address this matter in particular, the VP pointed to the significant investments being made by the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) Administration in electronic traffic management through speed cameras and e-ticketing.
But the bottom-line, according to Jagdeo, is that the GPF must “openly confront the issues where people lack trust in them”.
Just last month, the VP had posited that the GPF needs to do more to keep the public informed on various issues in the security sector.
“Because we get blamed for any incompetence…,” Jagdeo had contended.