Managing police vehicles
Each time that a fleet of vehicles is acquired for the Guyana Police Force the commissioning ceremony is unfailingly attended by a robust admonition of the Force over what is seen as the poor management of its vehicles and an ‘appeal’ to do better. Frankly, that never seems to work.
Back in September, at a ceremony held to mark the handing over of fifty new vehicles to the Force, President Irfaan Ali asked that it find ways to undertake an “assessment of its capacity to manage these assets. The vehicles provided to the Force must not be used for joyrides,” he was reported as saying. ‘Joy rides,’ of course, would presumably cover all of the various non-policing ‘errands’ for which police vehicles are pressed into service.
The President, one assumes, was pointing fingers at the ‘high command’ of the Force since, in an institution that has responsibility for law and order, it is those at the top who must, ultimately, ‘carry the can’ for the improper management of its strategic inventory.
At the time of the September vehicle commissioning, the President harked back to “four years earlier” when the Chinese Government had gifted the Force a fleet of vehicles which, we are told, had included “fifty-six pick-up vehicles, five buses, thirty-five All-Terrain Vehicles and Forty-eight motorcycles…….When my government assumed office,” President Ali went on, “only thirty-nine of those one hundred and forty vehicles were working…with one hundred and one down for repairs, some of which were already unserviceable.” The less said about that, the better.
What was significant about these revelations by the President was that there was never, at least as far as this newspaper recalls, the imposition upon the leadership of the Force, any responsibility for accounting for what, by any stretch of the imagination, was an altogether unacceptable situation. Since then nothing has been heard, at least as far as we know about the stricken vehicles though what we were told is that some of them will probably never ‘see the road’ again since their Chinese manufacturer is no longer ‘in the business’.
Two points should be made at this juncture. First, that the ‘high-maintenance’ regime that applies to police vehicles is, in many if not most instances, a function of the particular legitimate duties that these are required to fulfill. That said, of course, there is much to be said for the President’s ‘joy-ride’ admonition. After all, what one might call policing can cover a wide swathe of pursuits. The second point that should be made, of course, is that damage (even serious damage) to police vehicles can, in a great number of instances, be ‘put down’ to the exigencies of their law-enforcement pursuits. What in motoring parlance can be described as a ‘fender-bender,’ and much worse, can easily put down to “collateral damage,” associated with
substantive law enforcement pursuits, in which instances it requires the simplest of procedures to have what may be millions of dollars in damages set aside without too many probing questions being asked. Such ‘triflings’ can easily be ‘fixed’ by those who administer the law.
One imagines, of course, that there are protocols and procedures associated with the management of police vehicles that speak to matters of damage to state property and issues of culpability and responsibility to ‘make good,’ except of course that the nature of police work would ‘make allowances’ that would certainly not apply to other categories of vehicles, whether these be state-owned or otherwise. It is unlikely, that the public would be au fait with all of the nuances and subtleties that afford the police the latitude they possess in their use of state property, particularly vehicles and in the application of penalties for ‘transgression.’ This has to do with the generous ‘wiggle room’ which the Force has to selectively apply to the regulations to suit the circumstance. The second point here is that, as we learn from numerous everyday experiences, the strict application of the law is not, all too frequently, the first option exercised by some policemen. There are instances, many of them, in which ways are found to bend the law rather than enforce it. In the matter of mindfulness of the prudent management and care of police vehicles there is no reason to assume that the rules are any different.