The killing of Orin Boston by the Police has once again set Guyana on the edge of a very slippery slope. The society was already tense with the confluence of the politicised fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic and political fallout of the attempted elections’ rigging of March 2020.
There are so many unexplained elements in the killing that cry out for some rational explanation that there has to be an Inquiry into the killing of Mr Boston, and one has been promised. It should not be politicised, but we know it will be. I call it “killing” at this time in the same spirit that I voted with the PNC against the PPP’s motion in 2005 that called for a COI into the “assassination” of Walter Rodney. Even though I believe the killing was a “murder” just as Rodney’s was an “assassination”, we must allow the process to take its course.
Most of the troubling facts on Mr Boston’s killing have been ventilated in the press: why was a SWAT team deployed; what information could they have on him when they first went to his sister’s house; what were the exigencies for “apprehending” him that it could not wait until daybreak, but also necessitated violating the standard “knock and announce” rule? We know there was no warrant.
Then there was the now abandoned assertion by the Police that there was a “confrontation” that precipitated the shooting. From the very terse autopsy report, we learn that ‘the cause of death was given as haemorrhage and shock due to gunshot injuries to the chest. A single warhead was extracted from the body of the deceased.” But there is that hole in the mattress on which Mr Boston was shot, evidenced by the blood on the sheets. Was a second bullet fired?
All Guyana must insist on a proper and thorough investigation of these and other questions that have arisen. From the formation of the GPF in 1839, it was not an institution to “serve and protect” the citizens of this country. It was deliberately NOT modelled on the London Metropolitan Police (the unarmed “Bobbies”), but the armed Irish Constabulary, designed to impose “law and order” on an assumed recalcitrant populace. Independence did nothing to change that orientation, and in fact, during the PNC’s 28 years, facilitated the “control state” and became even more brutal within our ethnicised politics. The Police’s Target Special Squad (TSS) or “Black Clothes”, which earned so much opprobrium, was formed by President Desmond Hoyte. In 1989, this writer was subjected to their ministrations, and saw them up close and personal.
We need not rehearse the tragic events from 1998 (not 2002, as some insist, starting with the Mash Day jailbreak) to 2008, and the role of the Police in them. Significantly, all Guyanese concluded that the GPF needed to be “professionalised”, but, sadly, we all look at it through ethnic lenses, and complain only when “our” group is facing the fire – literally.
From the beginning of our involvement in Guyana, ROAR has called for the Disciplined Forces to be professionalised. Our early calls in the late eighties were interpreted as partisan and anti-PNC, since the forces by then had been made appendages to that regime. Our calls for the forces to be professionalised by “streamlining it, decentralising it and balancing it” after the January 12th ethnic riots were again seen in that light – even though events had unfortunately unfolded in accordance with the predictions of our analysis.
Most critics focused only on the “balancing” recommendation – disregarding the wider recommendations for professionalisation – many of which have been incorporated in later official (domestic and foreign) recommendations.
Our country, like all countries, needs a Police Force, but the Police Force as presently constituted and constructed cannot satisfy that need. Each government has tried to ignore this elephant in the room – the ethnic imbalance. Those who are complaining about the present contretemps with the Police brass ignore former President Granger’s contrived “assassination plot” to mould that “brass” in his image.
In conclusion, I quote Cynthia Enloe, who studied the Guyana military within a comparative context: “…the police and military must be ethnically reconstituted at the top and the bottom. Resolution of inter-ethnic conflict will be tenuous if the security that is achieved is merely state security and not security for each of the state’s resident communities.”
