Earlier this year, Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Williams, responsible for the Force’s administration, which encompasses recruitment, revealed that the GPF was actively working with Toshaos from various hinterland communities to help identify appropriate indigenous persons to join the GPF. This is very commendable, since, as DCP Williams said, this will add to the diversity of the Force.
While statistics on the Force’s ethnic composition are not made available, the optics on the 244 recruits as of May 2019 do not suggest that the recommendations of the Disciplined Forces Commission (DFC), as far as “ethnic diversity” is concerned, were being implemented. Especially since the latter had specified measures to increase the number of Indian Guyanese in the GPF.
The DFC, of which now President David Granger was a member, conducted hearings in 2003 and submitted its 164 recommendations to Parliament in 2004; Seventy-one recommendations concerned the Guyana Police Force. The Commission recommended, with regard to manpower, that the Police Force should aim at achieving greater ethnic diversity without employing a quota system. To achieve this, ethnically diverse recruitment teams should be employed as openly and extensively as possible.
The Recommendations were finally approved by a Select Parliamentary Committee in 2010. Two new Police Training Centres had been opened in the meantime: in Berbice and Essequibo, as recommended, but the initiative on Indigenous Peoples is the first on the diversity front.
While, just before Independence, the PPP had strenuously argued for the GPF to be made more ethnically diverse; after the free and fair elections of 1992, they attempted no rectification of the historically enforced imbalances. Subsequent to the post-1997 elections’ ethnic violence, constitutional changes following the Herdmanston Accord were introduced in 2000, and one clause called for a Commission to enquire into, among other things, “the composition” of the entire Disciplined Forces, which includes the GPF. The changes mandated by the DSC in 2010 were constitutionally sanctioned, and there ought to be reasons why they are evidently being ignored.
The British had insisted, as part of the conditions for granting Independence to Guyana under the PNC, that the latter rectify the imbalance in the armed forces, including the GPF, as identified by the PPP. The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), invited by the PNC in 1965 to investigate the ethnic imbalances in the state sector and to offer recommendations towards their rectification, declared that in the GPF, Indian Guyanese comprised 20.7%, compared with 71.9% African Guyanese.
They recommended that the Police Force should reflect, to a greater degree, the composition of the population. More specifically, that 75% of recruits and cadets for the next five years be Indian-Guyanese, until the goal was reached.
The PNC accepted the recommendations of the Commission, and claimed that the very next year, 76 of 102 Police recruits were Indians. However, Prof. K. Danns, in his doctoral thesis on the Guyanese armed forces (Domination and Power in Guyana), claimed that the PNC ceased to make statistics available after 1966, but that data collected by him showed that the Government did not implement the ICJ’s recommendations, and actually decreased the number and percentage of Indians accepted. He showed that between 1970 and 1977, while the size of the Force was being doubled, 92.2% of recruits were Africans, with only 7.84% being Indians.
Their numbers dropped to less than ten percent of the GPF.
After over a hundred years of being excluded from the GPF, first by the British then by the PNC, Indians had internalised the myth that they were ‘not fit’ to be Policemen. Some of the few who bucked the tide were peripheralised. Indians who were accepted after the 1970s were placed in the Special Branch, (plain clothes) and posted to Indian villages to spy on their fellow Indians. This policy created further distrust of the Police Force among Indians.
Now that the GPF has initiated its push for diversity in the Indigenous communities, as per the recommendations of the DFC, they should finally rectify the historical anomaly in the Indian Guyanese community.
