Your Eyewitness knows that he sounds like a broken record, but he can’t help returning to the sorry state of our Police Force; which, from the newspaper reports, is getting sorrier by the minute. Yes, minute!! In addition to the condign quotidian use of force on the citizenry to presumably keep “law and order” as was set out by the British colonial order, we now have a series of crimes that go far beyond the old shakedown for a “fried rice”. But judging from the protruding bellies that have now become the order of the Police Force, they haven’t given up on fried rice!!
So, we now have regular beatings, shootings and, suddenly, “white collar” crimes like embezzlement and illegal establishment and use of businesses to build fortunes!! What he’d like to discuss – as he always tries to do in these matters – is the contextuality of the broader issue in terms of our lived reality in Guyana. The police are the most ubiquitous arm of the state that’s visible to the ordinary citizen, and they are given a lot of power. This includes the ULTIMATE power of the state – to snuff out the lives of citizens if they, the police, determine the “order” of society – including their own lives – is at risk. That’s a lotta power; and, like all power, we shouldn’t be surprised it corrupts the wielders!!
To deal with the initial potential “threat” from the masses, states have organized the police in a very militarized manner from its beginning in the 19th century. And while there’ve since been reforms, the militarized orientation stubbornly persists. In Guyana, there’s been talk for decades of addressing this orientation by renaming the police institution as the “Police Service” rather than “Police Force” – and changing their Standard Operating Procedures (SOPS) to operationalize the “kinder, gentler” approach. But we haven’t gotten anywhere, have we? In America, it has long been recognized that in a racially diverse society, part of the problem is that some groups are underrepresented in the police. This has been ignored in Guyana.
The accountability of the police is always an issue: with that much power, it’s always open to abuse. Take the force used to subdue several suspects who were killed in “confrontations” over the last decades. It’s a regular feature for the police to report that the victims were attacking them with cutlasses — as if Guyanese think cutlasses can ward off bullets!! But the graduation of the police into white-collar crimes is just as wrong as their brutality – they can use their position to shake down at levels light years above fried rice!!
So, will the police “force” ever become a police “service”?
…and institutional culture
The legendary management guru Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. He, of course, was talking about business culture and its impact on management strategies for achieving their goals and objectives. Unless you change the culture of the business you wish to be successful, even if you come up with the best strategy in the world, it’ll fail.
And we return to our Police Force, whereon we therefore should be spending a hell of a lot more of our time in changing its culture to one of “service” if we ever expect to have fewer arbitrary police killings and other abuses here. We have to start with recruitment – and this means increased salaries in addition to requiring more education. The training would also have to involve a thorough inculcation of the basic courtesies that the police should extend to citizens. Have you ever been stopped by the police on the road?
But, ultimately, values can only be transmitted through action – and in this case, the actions of the police brass!
…and intellect
Pres Ali met the head of USAID, Samantha Power. She’s an immigrant who made it good big time!! From Yale, she became a journalist who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on genocide, and then was the US Rep to the UN.
