The Disciplined Services and the political administration

The Guyana Police Force finds itself, not for the first time in recent years, between a proverbial rock and a hard place, the consequences of that circumstance having implications for its public image as much as for its ability to hold itself up above the sorts of controversies that impinge on its ability to discharge its responsibilities without having to look over its shoulder to encounter expressions of derision and scorn. There are those who, these days, even question the applicability of the Force’s motto ‘Service and Protection.’

Political parties that hold office in many, perhaps most countries, will always seek to exercise some measure of ‘control’ over the disciplined forces, though, whatever the extent of the altruism articulated in their motives, the motive, at ‘bottom line’ is always one that is underpinned, first and foremost, by self-interest.

This is not the first time that matters of concern arising out of the relationship between the Guyana Police Force and the political directorate have surfaced and become the subject of national discourse. The outcomes and the consequences of the aforementioned relationship, previously, are a matter of public record, some of them having left an ugly and difficult to erase stain on the Police Force and for that matter, on the national image. Some matters have surfaced again.

Some of the concerns that have to do with the integrity of the GPF have appeared anew. There are those concerning the Police Service Commission and police promotions, on the one hand and what is being widely interpreted as yet another excursion into political interference into the administration of the GPF. The Service Commission placed there to, among other things, remove critical control levers from the hands of politicians in office, is now, seemingly, in open confrontation with the political authorities. Slippery slope?

There is as well, unfolding, one of those seriously image-defacing episodes which the Force has previously had to endure, arising out of cruder attempts by the political authorities to tamper with the operational fabric of the Force. There has been evidence of this most recently.

Whatever political administrations may say in their defence, whenever those who rule begin to make cases for the creation of anomalous law enforcement enclaves – whether these be christened Special Squads or called by any other name – hornets’ nests are immediately opened up, huge openings into which concerns about ulterior motives step in. In the context of an institution charged with the maintenance of law and order and fighting crime, any interventions that fall outside of the laid down rules by which that institution functions can end disastrously. Guyana has

had its own not-to-be-forgotten experiences in that regard.

One might add that what, in its present incarnation, is being described as a “new force” which, seemingly, the political administration thinks it necessary to add to the Guyana Police Force, is just the kind of development that sometimes eludes public attention so that it is not at all unhelpful that we have a Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) that is both sufficiently alert and sufficiently non-partisan to put up its hand in query. The point to be made here has to do first with the degree of autonomy usually granted this category of law-enforcers and worse, the shocking extent of the latitude that attends their enforcement powers. When elements of what is deemed to be a national law-enforcement institution appear to be possessed of no accountability to the institution itself but appear to be answerable, instead, to political elements then it is time to raise an alarm.

Quite why it seems that the incumbent political administration thinks it necessary to create a “new force” which, as the GHRA puts it seeks to formalize the “existing practice of treating the Guyana Police Force and the Guyana Defence Force as subject to political direction” is unclear. That said, our collective memory, hopefully, is still sufficiently intact to recall the tendency of those who rule to twist and bend these amorphous law-enforcement enclaves to their will, leaving wide open the possibility that they might go down alleyways that are not only challengeable in the context of the substantive role of the disciplined services themselves, but which, all too often, are themselves underpinned by highly unpalatable extra-judicial options. The Guyana Police Force has passed that way before.

All of the negative attention which the Force is attracting at this time is decidedly harmful to an image that is already nothing to write home about.

That said, we must be vigilant because precedent suggests that worse can happen. What we do not need at this time is for the concerns raised recently by the GHRA to evaporate into a sudden national quiet out of which suddenly emerges swift descent down dark, politically directed alleyways at the other end of which lurk grotesque and dangerous distortions of law enforcement.

Public education is important here. One of our own deficiencies in this regard is the absence of a clear understanding of the powers and prerogatives of those who rule. The danger in this deficiency, of course, is that we become blind to the overstepping of authority, our attention drawn much later than it ought to be by the manifestations of what is perhaps the obscene superseding of the authority allowed government.

As has already been mentioned there have been times, previously, when the surrendering of control of parts of the disciplined services to political control and the attendant public indifference to that development, had, over time, blown up in our faces, costing lives and triggering vigorous after-the-fact remonstrations and expressions of regret that solved nothing. The fact of the matter is that if there ever again appears reason to believe that some similar misfortune of political control of the state security apparatus or parts therefore is about to occur then the painful lessons of the past dictate that we take such legitimate action as is necessary to change the government’s mind.