Dear Editor,
The relatives and friends and all right-thinking Guyanese were upset at the way in which 23-year-old Quindon Bacchus was killed by the Police on the East Coast last June 10th – a Friday. There were just too many discrepancies between the Police’s account and the video clip that had been circulating. The family strenuously disputed the Police’s account. On Monday June 13, Top COP Hicken visited the family, offered his sympathy, and informed them that the Police Complaints Authority (PCA) was going to investigate the killing, since there needed to be absolute impartiality. The Police investigating a Police just wouldn’t do. The Police rank who shot Bacchus was placed under close arrest.
The PCA is an independent body, and they have to follow whatever statutory imperatives they are governed by. Neither the Police nor the political directorate can get involved, lest they be accused of “interference”. It just so happens that, just two weeks earlier, on May 24, 30-year-old Deanraj Singh, called Steve Singh, had been shot and killed at Riverview, Ruimveldt, by the Police, where the family also disputed the Police’s account. The Police had then announced that the killing would be investigated by their Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), and the Police rank in question was placed under close arrest.
It would appear, then, that the PCA and OPR are both used by the Police Force to investigate allegations of crimes committed by GPF ranks, before passing them on to the DPP to determine whether charges should be laid by the Police.
Secondly, while there have been questions raised about the propriety, if not legality, of ranks accused of committing crimes being placed under “close arrest”, rather than being remanded while under investigation, it would appear that this is the GPF’s “custom and practice” for many years. All in all, if supporters of justice for Bacchus were upset at the sloth at which the wheels of justice were turning in general, and why the accused rank had not been charged in two weeks in particular, they should have directed their indignation at the PCA.
Comparable lack of “justice” in the killing of Singh appears to have been forgotten.
But we remain with the larger question about the lack of professionalism by the GPF: a question that occupied the authorities ever since the riots before independence, and which has still not been answered. While there are no monocausal reasons for this state of affairs, one of the major ones is the lack of ethnic representativeness in the composition of the GPF, even though several local and international CoIs have recommended its rectification. This leads to all sorts of external interventions that ensure the debilitating status quo remains firmly in place.
And we had another protest march for justice degenerating into violence against innocent citizens, which was a foregone outcome, as I have been warning. Where is the justice for the violated? The instigators of the protest are more than being cynically disingenuous at feigning sympathy at the outcome.
They are even more criminal than the arsonists, looters and violent assaulters. Yet they continue to call for more protests.
Sincerely,
Ravi Dev
