Guyanese police and judiciary aided by Vancouver justice project
By -- Kim Bolan
Guyana police investigate murder in Georgetown in July 2017.
GEORGETOWN, Guyana — Members of the Guyana Police Force have set up yellow crime tape and cordoned off the area where local minibus driver Tedroy James was shot to death an hour earlier.
The driver was trying to prevent a robbery of one of his passengers when the robber’s accomplice pulled out a gun and shot James in front of his shocked passengers.
Distraught witnesses watch from the sidewalk in front of a small café as investigators examine James’s blood-soaked seat and collect evidence from the surrounding area.
When Vancouver resident Evelyn Neaman arrives at the disturbing crime scene, she is encouraged to see the way investigators are working.
They are wearing latex gloves, videotaping the area and setting up evidence markers.
“All of these guys have done our training,” Neaman tells a visiting Postmedia journalist.
Neaman is the Guyana project manager for the Vancouver-based Justice Education Society, a non-profit organization with a 25-year history of working to strengthen justice systems in Canada and abroad.
In B.C., JES runs popular educational programs about the court system for students of all ages. Internationally, the Vancouver group has built a reputation for working on justice reform projects in some of the world’s most dangerous countries, including El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico.
JES has brought Canadian police to Guyana to improve training standards and introduce new investigative techniques. Judges and prosecutors from Vancouver have also travelled to Georgetown to share their expertise with their Guyanese counterparts. Sixteen B.C. experts have come here in the two and half years since JES’s Guyana project was launched.
A poor, English-speaking country of about 775,000 on the north coast of South America, Guyana has more of a connection to the Caribbean than to its Spanish-speaking neighbours.
It has been plagued by a high rate of violent crime. The murder rate in Guyana ranked third on the continent in a 2013 United Nations report with 20.4 slayings per 100,000 residents, and armed robberies often turn deadly, as in the case of minibus driver Tedroy James. The Government of Canada warns travellers to Guyana to exercise a high degree of caution due to crime.
It is also a conservative country when it comes to drug laws — someone caught with a small amount of marijuana can spend years in custody, awaiting trial alongside hardened criminals involved in organized crime.
JES officials were invited to Guyana in early 2015 “to meet people and explore the viability of this project,” says B.C. Provincial Court Associate Chief Judge Melissa Gillespie.
She has made several trips here to share her knowledge and experience with local magistrates and prosecutors.
“We have tried to do quite a lot of work around quality control and the police investigation and ensuring that matters aren’t coming to court before they are thoroughly investigated. That continues to be a challenge, of course, because there is always the tension between the presumption of innocence and people spending significant periods of time on remand awaiting trial,” says Gillespie, who is also a JES board member.
Former Canadian High Commissioner Pierre Giroux is a big fan of JES and the work it does. When he was a diplomat in El Salvador he saw the Vancouver group aid police and prosecutors trying to deal with the deadly gang problem.
“The results we saw were as good, if not more spectacular in a certain sense, because you’re in a much more difficult environment,” he told Postmedia during a recent interview in Georgetown.
“When I came here and I heard the project was starting, I was so happy because the method that JES has developed is quite unique.”
Gillespie says the strength of JES is that it makes long-term commitments to developing countries to ensure that changes to the justice system are not only implemented, but maintained.
“They keep going back and they build the strength and the confidence and the courage to make change in the people who live in the country,” she says.
The Canadian government funded the first three years of the Guyana project and the US is now providing ongoing resources to JES to continue its work there.
Retired Edmonton Mountie Jon Forsythe has done work for JES since 2012. He delivered a bloodstain-pattern analysis course to police in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras before beginning his work in Guyana.
Here he has developed and delivered a crime scene examination course, plus a guide that can be used by locals to continue the training after he leaves.
When Forsythe first arrived in Georgetown in July 2016, he found health and safety standards for police officers were lacking at crime scenes. They didn’t know how to take proper photos that would be effective in court. They didn’t always wear gloves or cordon off a crime scene. They marked exhibits by carving their initials into them.
There were also issues with “the care and control of the exhibits seized from crime scenes,” Forsythe says.
“And their facility to house exhibits was deplorable. Dilapidated buildings. Rat-infested. Holes in the buildings, which allowed environmental damage to exhibits such as rain, wind, dust.”
JES addressed those issues. Forsythe designed a state-of-the-art storage facility made from two shipping containers. It’s air-conditioned and locked, ensuring crime scene exhibits are properly catalogued and stored.
=To Be Continued=