Jun 02, 2019 Features / Columnists, – Adam Harris
I have been living in a cycle of crime and police action. Sometimes I wonder if this will ever end, especially since most of the crime is imported. It is not that deportees are the main perpetrators. Rather, it is the association with these deportees that is spawning this trend.
I remember when there were the kick-down-the door bandits. That was a time when homeowners began to place metal bars across their doors and windows.
Some men simply cased a location and pounced with such vengeance that terror reigned in the land. Most of these attacks occurred in the city and along the eastern corridor. Men would imitate people in the movies and dress in dark clothing.
They would attack a home with such force as to terrorise the people inside. They would assault the homeowners and demand cash and jewellery.
At the time, Desmond Hoyte was the president of the country. He decided to nip this rampage in the bud. He was not averse to implementing the death penalty because, as he said, a man’s home is his palace.
He reached out to the victims and pretty soon the police began to arrest some of the perpetrators. In one case, the home owner had some corrosive liquid which he threw over the wall and burnt one of the invaders.
The gang was caught and eventually executed. In a short space of time there were nine executions, earning Hoyte the sobriquet ‘Hang dem High’ from his initials. That spate of crime ended quickly. It was not until recently that there were home invasions again.
Of course, there were the other crimes such as the ‘choke and rob’. These were violent crimes. At the time, too, there was not too much talk about human rights. The prison was allowed to institute punishment by way of floggings.
The cat o’ nine tails had been abandoned because of the disfigurement it caused the recipient. People balked at the severity. What was known was that anyone who received the cat was unlikely to commit a violent crime again.
I was stationed at Bartica and I visited the Mazaruni Prisons for many reasons. I was an information officer, so I took movies by way of a projector to the prisons. I also played cricket, so my club often played against the prison officers.
I remember one Sunday, a prisoner was kicking around a football with some others when he doubled over and vomited blood. I learnt that he had been beaten with the ‘cat’ and effectively disfigured.
I saw two other recipients. One was a man named Coltress. He had brutally chopped a policeman in the city. On his release from prison he looked like an old man. He was in his fifties when he died.
Another showed films in the cinema. He was a Portuguese man. He too died relatively young. His body bore the marks, but his life of crime was effectively ended.
I am not advocating a return to those brutal punishments. I am all for prison reform, but the prison officers are just not skilled enough to effect reform. Some of them are one step from a life of crime. All one has to do is look at the smuggling that goes on inside the prison.
Prison officers have been known to smuggle guns inside. There was the jailbreak of February 2002 in which a gun was used. Roxanne Winfield is a vegetable as a result of that attack. Her colleague, a male, died as five prisoners made their escape.
That escape spawned a crime wave that was unprecedented. It also spawned a violent reaction from the police. Many people died. Policemen were killed.
The pacifists in our midst said that the brutal police action merely gave rise to an equally ruthless band of criminals. The army took to the streets. It was about six years before the society could breathe again.
During that period, life in the city ground to a halt. Night life was almost non-existent. People simply stayed home.
I remember driving to Buxton in the wee hours one morning, shortly after one o’clock. When I reached the East Coast Demerara Highway I saw one tail light way ahead. There was nothing behind me. Coming back to the city, the roadway was even more desolate.
Now there is another wave that started in Berbice. Things got out of hand and the police dealt with the situation in a ruthless manner. Not for the first time, the people lauded the police. They are sleeping better at nights. Further, there have been no reports of violent crime in the eastern county.
In the city, just this past week, a group of men who were all very young and who were not strangers to the police, came to a grisly end in Norton Street, Lodge.
The reports are that they first went to a house, but the people there closed their doors, so the gunmen went next door.
The victim is still traumatized, especially as he recalled the threat to his five-year-old son. He said that the child kept asking him if the gunmen were going to kill them. What can a father say to a five-year-old who is having his first reality check with death?
Fortunately, the police were not far away. Some say that two motorcycle policemen saw the suspicious movement and called in for reinforcement.
It is said that the gunmen had three handguns; the police had firepower. Some say they expended too many bullets. The truth is that only a person caught up in such a situation can understand. In the end, three men were dead.
I was asked by a woman why did the police have to kill a man who had surrendered. She reportedly saw some video. I asked her if the man who surrendered was wounded. She could not say.
What I do know is that one of the men who died was the descendant of a man who died violently. He was one of the five who broke out of the Camp Street jail in 2002. He was gunned down in Prashad Nagar.
His relatives say they often asked him to desist from his life of crime, to no avail. It was as if he was courting an appointment with death.
There was another who, from his teenage years, was embroiled in criminal life. He was shot while still a teenager.
I am sorry when young men die like that, but I tell myself that they are not sorry for themselves and that I should keep my sympathy for myself.
Sadly, though, others will spring up. It is a never-ending cycle.
