More than a new police commissioner needed to change a force that is steeped in corruption

Dear Editor,
The time has come for the Guyana Police Force (GPF) to be held accountable for the increasing crime rate and civilian brutality and deaths arising from Police actions and armed bandits.
Although having the Special Squad Unit and the U.S-DEA in the country, crime remains of grave concern to the people. For too long there has been the traditional “hands-off” approach to crime fighting by the Minister of Home Affairs who continues to ignore the sufferings of the people due to crime and police abuse.
The people are hardly ever consulted or listened to. The almost daily announcements of another armed robbery and murder are solid evidence that crime is unfortunately still reaping havoc in the lives of the people. The Minister of Home Affairs has failed to mobilize the top brass of the Police to participate effectively in cleaning up crime in the country. The Minister has and continues to disguise his failures with silly excuses.
The General Secretary continues to insult the people at his weekly press conferences by only addressing his party issues but has remained dumb on the high crime rate and how to reduce it. Neither has he dealt with police brutality nor corruption in the force.
The Minister only intervenes or give directives to the force when members and supporters of the PPP are robbed or harassed. As a case in point when a robbery was about to occur at NO. 47 Village on the Corentyne, a PPP strong hold, the Minister of Home Affairs intervened immediately and ordered the transfer of all the police officers from NO. 51 Police Station without an investigation. It goes to show how partisan the minister is and yet he claims to act on behalf of all the people.
His inability to fight crime stems from his lack of experience and qualifications in security related issues. His idea of dealing with crime is to blame the opposition and to distort the truth that crime is reducing when in fact organized crime, drug trafficking, armed robbery, murders, gunrunning and smuggling and the “murder for hire gangs are  rapidly improving.
Further, the minority PPP regime has not enacted and used laws where necessary to protect the youths, elderly and the disadvantaged from arbitrary police brutality and abuse and to protect the people’s individual rights to life and freedom. Instead, the ruling cabal has enacted laws that are unfair to the people, costly to the country, but will enrich their friends, relatives and themselves.
We believe that an audit has to be conducted on the entire police force to see how it is poorly managed and the high level of corruption that has engulfed it. The Force needs to be reorganized and cleaned up once and for all in order to gain the trust and confidence of the people. It is better to clear the police force of unsuitable and rogue cops and have a smaller, trustworthy and more capable and efficient police force which will earn the respect and support of the people to fight crime than to have a corrupt, incompetent and unprofessional force.
A new police commissioner by himself will never change a force that is steeped in brutality, unprofessionalism and corrupt practices unless the current Minister of Home Affairs resigned and is replaced by a qualified and competent person. This will reduce the public mistrust of the force which has become deep-seated and in the end will corruption in the force and reduce crime in general.
The new Police Commissioner will not succeed because of the massive corruption in the force and because there are too many broken-hearted parents, relatives, friends who have lost loved ones at the hands of the armed bandits and the police.
The people are tired of crime as well as the physical abuse dished out to them by the heartless and unprofessional police for no apparent reason. The fear of crime and the merciless police beatings of alleged criminals to confess to crimes they did not commit still affects the nation’s psyche, especially the youths.
So far, Mr. Seelall Persaud and the Crime Mr. Chief Leslie James have not done anything substantial to change the brutal mentality and corrupt practices of the unprofessional police force to a more professional, caring and decent one. Guyanese all over the country are fed-up with the high crime rate and the abuse of the police force.
Asquith Rose and Harish Singh