Law enforcement: Image is everything
No country can lay serious claim to possessing an effective overall law enforcement regime in circumstances where the ‘reach’ of law enforcement is constrained either by a substantive lack of physical and technical resources necessary for effective delivery, or, on account of a paucity of support from other critical institutions in the country, as a whole. That said, law enforcement, by its nature, faces its own ‘demons’ and these, as it happens, must be addressed through rules and procedures that are not explicitly spelt out in the ‘Force Orders.’ If strategies associated with law enforcement are to have the best chance of being effective then there can be no question that policing must operate against the backdrop of how the other half lives. Here it has to be said that while there may well be risks, sometimes considerable ones, associated with ‘sleeping with the enemy’, so to speak, policing is likely to have a decidedly more challenging job in fighting crime if it is not possessed of ‘channels’ through which it can understand how the other half lives. Put differently, law enforcement (whatever we may see on the face of it) is not ‘cut and dried’. The risk here revolves around issues of integrity.
Unpalatable as it may seem to the casual observer, those aspects of effective policing that might involve a role for influences outside of the Force itself often turn on arrangements of quid pro quo that cedes to the element on the ‘other side’ a certain measure of latitude. The challenge here for the Police is to leverage the latitude that it enjoys, while limiting the parameters of the ‘give back’ which its ‘partner’ on the other side might seek. It is doubtful that any serious Police Force is likely to officially acknowledge its relationship with ‘the other side.’ The best that can be said here is if law enforcement it is be delivered in a manner that provides the greatest assurance of its effective execution then its operational complexities cannot deliver through disclosures that are bellowed from the ‘roof tops’ of the society. One might argue that the crime-fighting gains to be derived from discretion in the dissemination of information outweigh what is often perceived as the public’s right to know. There is, of course, a downside to all this.
Globally – including here in Guyana – there has always been evidence that what we describe as effective crime-fighting is often attended by what one might call unintended but inevitable ‘openings’ through which the agents of law enforcement have opportunities to extract their own proverbial ‘pound of flesh’. This observation is by no means intended to cast aspersions on the overarching policing system, it is simply a way of making the point that people, in any sphere of activity, are likely to take advantage
of ‘holes’ that are, accidentally or otherwise, created in the system. It is, for example, instructive to be informed about the ‘regime’ that reportedly obtains in the ‘ticket’ system that applies in instances of sanctions for traffic offences and of the reported ‘well-oiled machine’ that that system represents.
The point should be made here (if, indeed, it is at all necessary to do so) that if law enforcement systems are perceived as possessing divided loyalties, particularly in circumstances where those loyalties are diametrically opposed to each other, then the substantive ideals upon which those institutions specifically stand becomes dangerously imperiled. One particularly pointed example of this is the practice on the part of sections of the business community to offer gifts to the Police Force, a circumstance that ought to be reviewed with the utmost urgency.
Truth be told, the nature of these gifts sometimes appear to reflect the particular interests of the giver, rather than to the strengthening of the overall policing regime. Here, one wonders whether in the interest of its own image, the Guyana Police Force might not wish to make public its protocols and procedures associated with the receipt of gifts from business houses and other institutions. Such gifts, while they can be operationally useful to the Force, must not appear to be out-of-the-blue, cut and dried ‘presentations’ that do not appear to bear any particularly compelling relevance to the immediate operating requirements of the Force. To put it differently, the ‘optics’ of gifts accruing to the Force that might appear to have no direct bearing on its particular law enforcement priorities might easily set tongues wagging in a manner that does law enforcement no good.
It need hardly be said that questions of commitment and integrity and a sense of purpose applies in instances where effective policing depends on a collective effort that gives rise to the creation of ‘partnerships’ that involve both substantive law enforcement institutions and other bodies that buy into the idea that such types of collaboration make for more effective policing. Here, it has to be pointed that in some societies (perhaps many more than we might suspect) there are aspects of law enforcement, important, even critical ones, that rely on officially sanctioned ‘relationships’ between institutions, whose substantive preoccupations dwell in the realms of both law enforcement and what one might call substantive illegal/unlawful activity. The simple truth here is that effective policing frequently turns on the ability of the police to reach into the ‘nooks and crannies’ of crime and criminal activity. In the absence of that ‘reach’ effective crime-fighting can become dangerously compromised.
Understandings between the Police and some elements of ‘wider society’ can become fraught with risks from discomfiting compromises that may derive from gift-giving. The reason? The two sides may well exist for diametrically opposed reasons. While one might argue that effective ‘police work’ is frequently helped by its relationships which the Police ‘enjoy’ with its ‘helpers’ there are risks here too.
The Police Force can hardly afford to accommodate more lesions on its image. Where it becomes necessary for the Force to align itself with what one might call ‘strange bedfellows’ (and here the point should be made that such arrangements apply to law enforcement worldwide) as a mechanism for enhancing its crime-fighting capabilities then the issue of the ‘greater good’ arises. The point to be made, however, is that where such ‘arrangements’ exist, the purpose of their existence should be clearly defined and executed in a manner that does not cast ‘dark shadows’ over the Force that have to do with its own lawfulness and commitment to substantive law enforcement.