March 26 ,2021
It seems like many moons ago since street banditry took the form of choke-and-rob, with the assailant armed with no more than a knife. This would generally not be called into play provided the victim handed over money and jewellery with promptitude and made no attempt to resist. But then those were the days when anyone walking down the street with an open cutlass, even if it was just for weeding purposes, would be arrested by the police without further ado. Cutlasses had to be covered when in transit to a workplace.
No one is suggesting that choke-and-rob was not a major crime problem in its day, but in comparison with what we face currently it presented much less of an immediate threat to life and limb. What has changed the crime landscape is the introduction of guns on a large scale. Unlike the case of someone wielding a knife, an attacker does not need to get close to his target; shooting has an impersonal quality about it which stabbing does not have, as if the killing is being accomplished by remote control.
Given the fact that in addition some in our society are afflicted by a lack of any feeling of social obligation or indeed any connection to their fellow human beings, it is perhaps not altogether surprising that they easily entertain acts of violence as a route to a goal. And that goal relates to the satisfaction of their own needs or wants, irrespective of the rights of others.
The case of the killing of a contractor a few months ago, who had gone with one of his workmen to purchase cigarettes is probably not unusual. Stabroek News had been reliably informed at the time that the alleged shooter had confessed. His accomplice, he was reported as saying, wanted an XR motorcycle, and they had driven around Sophia several times on another motorbike looking for one. They had eventually located the kind they wanted outside a Kitty bar; the contractor was riding it, and he had been shot in the process of it being seized.
But there is another more critical element accounting for the present spate of violent crimes, and that is drugs. It is narcotics which are associated with the introduction of firearms, and also with the unbelievable savagery which often accompanies what otherwise might have qualified as a common or garden robbery. It must be presumed that many of those involved in banditry are consumers of drugs themselves, which inoculates them against the brutality of their actions, as well as providing the income they need to pay for their habit.
Drugs have done something else too, and that is introduce us to a gang culture, whose profile first came to our attention in a dramatic way following the 2002 breakout from the Georgetown prison, and the lawlessness which ensued thereafter. Even although we emerged from that episode a wiser and more frightened nation, the gangs did not go away, and sometimes what is presumed to be their hand comes to the attention of the nation, as in the case of the Ricardo Fagundes execution-style killing in Main Street recently.
This shooting was very much the case of a targeted hit, in addition to which one of the guns involved was an AK-47, which is usually associated with the narcotics trade. The other was a 9mm, the press was told. According to our report, Fagundes was walking towards a vehicle which was parked in front of the Palm Court, when two men came out of a white car parked on the eastern carriageway, ran towards him and opened fire. While one of the gunmen returned to the car, the other stood over him as he lay collapsed on the ground, and fired more shots. Altogether he was shot about twenty times. All this, it might be noted, took place not that far from State House.
Drugs flood across our borders, large stretches of which are very difficult to monitor, and in their wake come the guns. Years ago when the late Laurie Lewis was Police Commissioner, he had said that a lot of the guns in circulation here were Taurus pistols from Brazil. They are manufactured there, of course, as are AK-47s, although theoretically the distribution of the latter is supposed to be under Brazilian government control. Whether the main entry point for guns is still the south of the country is not known, although from time to time the public is informed that there have been seizures in Lethem. One suspects, however, that firearms come across all our frontiers.
In a letter to this newspaper in January this year, Dr Bertrand Ramcharan had cited a report on Guyana’s national security which had been published in 2015 by the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance. It had reported that this country’s homicide rate had risen to 18.4 homicides per 100,000 in the year of the review, making it the fifth most violent country in South America after Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil and Ecuador. It also estimated that the number of licit and illicit guns in civilian hands was 155,000 of which only about 50% had been registered. This compared to 15,500 firearms held by the GDF and 2,500 by the police.
Since those figures are from six years ago, they may not obtain now, but it is reasonable to suppose they are more-or-less in the right ballpark.
The reason for guns being in the hands of every petty criminal, is, as is well known, that they can be hired; they don’t have to be purchased. Considering that it used to be widely rumoured that they could be hired in some very public places, the question has to be asked why the police could at least not close down those operations. The report answered the question in the same way as the law-abiding public would answer it: “Police inefficiency and corruption are significant stumbling blocks to improving citizen security,” it was quoted as saying.
In terms of police inefficiency, the Fagundes shooting may provide a case in point. We had reported that a car which bore a resemblance to that used in the killing, and whose chassis number had been scraped off, was found on fire at Swan Village on the Linden-Soesdyke Highway. When contacted Minister of Home Affairs Robeson Benn said he had been informed that police roadblocks had been set up along the East Bank roadways, although he declined to say at what locations. He did, however, concede there were some “issues”.
“I have been told that there were roadblocks set up but apparently it was a question of timing and information passing. There was an issue of what vehicle and where it was heading and so on…There was an issue of what they were looking for and all of that and all the usual traffic on the road,” we quoted him as saying. This seems to speak for itself. In these situations speed is of the essence. There needs to be correct information from the first police responders, a command structure that can quickly decide what measures are needed to be taken immediately, and an information transmission system that can convey the orders clearly and expeditiously.
Police professionalism has been undermined by the politicians themselves over the decades, of course, and restoring that now will be a long-haul operation. The GPF is also not adequately equipped in material or human resource terms to make a major impact on the crime situation. In addition, of course, it is corrupt, which is not an easy matter to deal with, particularly when drugs money is involved. However, the powers-that-be could at least start with the Traffic Department, where most junior officers start out, and some learn the tricks of the corruption trade.
In the end, bringing down the incidence of violent crime depends on the police. If this government is serious, it will restrain its inclination to play politics as it has done in the past, and come up with comprehensive plans to restore professionalism, integrity and efficiency to the Police Force.