Violent crime

Prior to the APNU+AFC coalition winning office, the assumption in many quarters was that should Mr David Granger become president, then there would be an improvement in the crime situation on account of the security experience he would bring to bear on the problem. It hasn’t happened.

Never mind the police statistics about crime in general, the population at large knows from their own safety perspective that there has been no noticeable diminution in armed robberies and crimes of violence. From the mining areas of the interior, to Georgetown and its urbanised environs, to the Corentyne, the gunmen rampage, robbing, brutalising and sometimes killing their victims. Inevitably, businesspeople are frequently the targets owing to the fact that they are perceived to have money, but sometimes ordinary citizens with no particular resources find themselves at the wrong end of a gun or less commonly, a knife.

Last week, it turned out, was a particularly bad one where violent crime was concerned. There was the killing of gold miner Mr Deon Stoll, and the disturbing case of the strangling of a citizen in Church Street during a robbery. And if that were not enough, a businesswoman was shot in the leg and robbed by a lone gunman at the Harbour Bridge Mall.

The Corentyne, meanwhile, had its own tale to tell, with three armed bandits invading a Liverpool general store. Mr Ketwaroo, one of the owners, told this newspaper that he had been robbed four times in the area, and that he had also been robbed in Georgetown some months ago.

Reducing the incidence of crime in this society is not a simple or straightforward matter, and while there are calls for the government to act, its ambit of operation is strictly limited in the period prior to an election. The average citizen tends to see the problem of dealing with crime as one related only to catching and convicting criminals. While that is an essential element, it is not the only one. President David Granger, for his part, has appeared to concern himself with what might be termed the causes of crime, ie, the lack of employment for young people and the low levels of education. It is not that he is wrong about that, it is just that after more than four years in government, he has made no impact on the situation. His Commission of Inquiry on Education has produced no results, and the state of that sector is still much as it was when he assumed office. As it is, he is talking about putting oil money into education as a campaign issue, and one imagines that many of his listeners will be thinking,

As for making jobs available to youth, Finance Minister Winston Jordan did not rise to producing a series of budgets which stimulated the economy, although even if he had, it is perhaps a moot point as to how much impact he would have made on youth unemployment. One has to ask whether,

even if the jobs had become available, how many out-of-work youngsters would have taken them up, given that this is such a low-wage economy and the lure of quick money is all around them. And this, one has to remember, is a very materialistic society. One suspects therefore that many things have to change before young people see their future as lying locally, rather than in ‘Region Eleven.’

This is no longer a rule-governed society, and all the politicians of whatever persuasion have to take responsibility for that, including the coalition, which is acting so irresponsibly at present. The reality is that if politicians do not obey the law, they can hardly expect the citizenry to follow suit, but even if that were not the case, if the law is ignored or steps are taken to circumvent it by ordinary people on a regular basis, that will undermine our whole value system right down the line. And, as it is, people do ignore the law on a regular basis, the violations of the traffic code being a case in point.

Where the specifics of the crime problem are concerned, two relatively new elements have to be taken into consideration: one is drugs and the other is guns. In fact, the two are not necessarily unconnected, particularly where assault rifles are involved. Even if, as the popular view has it, that since the advent of the DEA here, Guyana has become less of a major transit point for large shipments of narcotics, there is still the matter of the substantial number of drug users and small-time (and perhaps not so small-time) traffickers locally.

Where this is concerned, the government has made absolutely no attempt at setting up additional drug rehabilitation centres, or educating youngsters about the dangers of ‘smoking’, as it is called, never mind President Granger’s seeming concern with the causes of crime. The opening of a drug court by the Judiciary tomorrow is a promising step by that branch of government.

The utter barbarity of many of the crimes we see nowadays is probably more often than not connected to criminals’ drug habits, while the number of killings has increased dramatically owing to the easy access bandits have to that lethal weapon, the firearm. Years ago, then Police Commissioner Henry Greene said that most handguns in this country were Taurus pistols which came from Brazil. What is the situation nowadays? Nobody knows. All that can be said is that the authorities appear to have made little headway tracing the routes by which guns become available to criminals, even minor league ones. While it is true our borders are porous and difficult to monitor, it was surely not beyond the capacity of the authorities in the last four years to break many of the networks of supply within the country.

Leaving aside the judicial system, which also has a role to play in the crime story, the organisation which people regard as the bulwark for their safety is inevitably the police. Despite all the undertakings of the government to make them a professional force again, this has not yet been achieved. It is true, of course, that reversing decades of decline and corruption is not going to be accomplished quickly, but enforcing the rules is going to start at the top, and will depend on the quality of the senior officers in charge. It should be said that President Granger’s interference in this area has not always been helpful.

That the problems are very deep-rooted is illustrated by how difficult it was to get the 911 number working again – there has been some improvement in that area – and how difficult it still is to have police respond promptly to emergency calls, particularly when armed bandits are involved. In the Ketwaroo case recounted above, the Whim police came immediately, possibly because the next-door neighbour was a policeman and it was he who phoned them. Not everyone is so fortunate as to have a policeman as a next-door neighbour.

The police themselves have always insisted that in order to solve crimes they need intelligence, and for that they require the assistance of the public. They are right. Their problem is that the public doesn’t trust them because they are perceived as corrupt. This perception has not been helped by the way the allegations brought by Berbice police officers against members of their own force, and in particular Deputy Commissioner Lyndon Alves, were handled. He was cleared without the commissioner giving any account of how that conclusion was arrived at, and without any more being said.

If there is one thing the government could do before the election to help the Police Force restore some of its standing in the eyes of the public, it would be to set up an independent investigation into the matter. After all, the President has established a Commission of Inquiry into a single accident on the Friendship public road, so exactly what is inhibiting him in relation to an issue which goes to the heart of the integrity of the GPF? Without corruption issues being confronted, there can never be an honest or competent mode of dealing with crime.

Apart from that, the government can still insist that the upper echelons of the force do the job they are paid to do, see their officers respond to emergency calls in particular, and sanction them when they don’t.

It is true that the Ministry of Public Security is in the process of setting up a network of CCTV cameras, and many private companies have it. There was surveillance video available, for example, in two of last week’s cases cited above. All that can be said at present is they do not appear to be discouraging the bandits, and eventually, one presumes, they will find ways of evading them. For the moment, however, one hopes they aid the police in identifying perpetrators.

Mr Ketwaroo and other businessmen are of the view that firearms should be issued to businesspeople. This is certainly something which the government could undertake before the election, although whether it will in fact make them safer is very difficult to assess. Certainly, psychologically they would feel more confident, but in practice it might not help them. Mr Stoll’s life, for example, was not saved by being in possession of a licensed gun, although perhaps a better case could be made out for those operating in the interior. In a general sense, of course, it is not good for a society to have large segments of its civilian population carrying firearms; as everyone knows from the US, that tends to increase the violence, not decrease it.

President Granger appears to be regarding the coming oil economy as the nation’s saviour. It will not solve the violent crime problem.