Domination and Power in Guyana

Domination and Power in

Guyana
A Study of the Police in a
Third World Context

George K. Danns

Foreword by Lewis A . Coser

Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

 FOR MY FAMILY
Ann, Dionne, and Tamara
My Sister Phyllis
and
My Mother Who Fathered Me

First published 1982 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge

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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 80-19179

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Danns, George K
Domination and power in Guyana.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Police—Guyana. I. Title.
HV8189.3.A2D36 363.2’0988'1 80-19179
ISBN 0-87855-418-1

ISBN 13:978-0-87855-418-8 (hbk)

 Contents
Acknowledgments ...................................................................................... ix
Foreword.................................................................................................... xi
Preface......................................................................................................... xiii

1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................ 1
Review of the Literature on the Police
Perspective and Plan of Study
Description of Methodology
2. THE POLICE IN GUYANA:
A COMPREHENSIVE OVERVIEW ........................................... 29
Laws of Guyana Governing the Police
Police Recruitment, Promotion, and Training
The Organization of the Police
3. POLITICS, CORRUPTION, AND THE POLICE....................... 67
On the Nature of Personalized
Rational-Legal Rulership
Politics and the Police
Corruption and the Police
4. RACE, INDUSTRIAL UNREST, AND THE PO L IC E ............. 105
Background
The Ethnic Balance and Ethnic Relations
Within the Guyana Police Force
Police Involvement in Racial
and Industrial Conflicts
Ethno-Industrial Disputes Under the PNC Regime
5. THE POLICE AND MILITARY IN GUYANESE SOCIETY . 143
Introduction
The Military Institutions in Guyana
Militarization in Guyana
Divide and Rule:
The Epitome of Civilian Control of the Military
6. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS:
DOMINATION AND POWER IN GUYANA.......................... 171
The Emergence of a Constitutional
Dictatorship in Guyana

Bibliography ............................................................................................ 185

Index ......................................................................................................... 191

v
 List of Tables and Figures

TABLES
2.1 Age of Respondent by Educational Qualifications.............................35
2.2 Race and Sex of Respondent by Last Type of Education Received .37
2.3 Divisional Distribution of Police Stations
and Outposts.......................................................................................... 50
2.4 List and Frequency of Disciplinary Infractions
by Police, 1973-1977 .......................................................................... 61
2.5 Policemen Punished for Breaches of Discipline.................................62
2.6 Incidence of Policemen Punished for Criminal
Behavior and Other Serious Misconducts............................................65
3.1 Police Partiality at Elections by Race and
District ................................................................................................... 86
3.2 Respondents’ Views by Race and District of Politicians’
Control of Police ...................................................................................88
3.3 Police Respondents on Politicians’ Influence
Within the Force ...................................................................................89
3.4 Police Respondents’ Views on the Degree of
Politicians’ lnfuence in Obtaining Better
Duty Assignments Within the Force....................................................91
3.5 Ethnic Responses on Police Corruption ..............................................95
3.6 Corruption and Police Complicity with Criminals............................. 96
3.7 Ethnic Response to Police B ribery......................................................99
3.8 Ethnic Response to Police Asking Monetary
F avors................................................................................................... 101
4.1 Racial Distribution of Population in Guyana
in 1946, 1960, and 1970 .....................................................................108
4.2 Total Racial Percentages in the Security Forces,
the Civil Service, Government Agencies, and
Undertakings and Areas of Government’s
Responsibility....................................................................................... 114
4.3 Racial Composition of British Guiana Police
(June 30, 1965) ................................................................................... 115
4.4 Racial Composition of Officer Grade
in British Guiana Police Force (June 30, 1965).................................115
4.5 Racial Breakdown of Applications Received and Persons
Recruited in British Guiana Police Force(1957-1964)..................... 117

vi
 List of Tables and Figures vii

4.6 Approximated Ethnic Distributions of the

Guyana Police Force, 1970-1977 .......................................................121
4.7 Approximated Distribution of Promotions in
the Guyana Police Force ..................................................................... 122
5.1 Estimated Organizational Strength of the
Armed Forces........................................................................................162
5.2 Expenditure on Military Institutions..................................................163

FIGURES
2.1 Guyana Police Force Organizational Chart......................................... 43
3.1 Police Respondents’ Views on Politicians’
Influence on Assignments Within the Police F orce............................90
3.2 Respondents’ Reaction to Police B ribery..........................................100
4.1 Racial Composition of Sample of Police Respondents ................... 124
 Abbreviations

BGVF B ritish G u ia n a V o lu n te e r F o rc e
B IT U B u s ta m e n te In d u s tria l T ra d e U n io n
C ID C rim in a l In v e s tig a tio n D e p a rtm e n t
CRCJ C e n te r fo r R e s e a rc h o f C rim in a l J u s tic e
ETB E x te rn a l T ra d e B u re a u
GAW U G u y a n a A g ric u ltu ra l W o rk e rs U n io n
GDF G u y a n a D e fe n c e F o rc e
GLU G u y a n a L a b o r U n io n
GMMW U G re n a d a M a n u a l a n d M e n ta l W o rk e rs U n io n
GNS G u y a n a N a tio n a l S e rv ic e
G PM G u y a n a P e o p le ’s M ilitia
IC J In te rn a tio n a l C o m m is s io n o f J u ris ts
NCOs N o n c o m m is s io n e d o ffic e rs
PNC P e o p le ’s N a tio n a l C o n g re s s
PPP P e o p le ’s P ro g re s s iv e P arty
PRO P u b lic R e la tio n s O ffic e r
PSC P o lic e S e rv ic e C o m m is s io n
PSU P u b lic S e rv ic e U n io n
PYO P ro g re s s iv e Y o u th O rg a n iz a tio n
SPEC S o c ia l, P o litic a l, an d E c o n o m ic C o u n c il
SSU S p e c ia l S e rv ic e U n it
TSU T a c tic a l S e rv ic e U n it
TUC T ra d e U n io n C o u n c il
TW U T ra n s p o rt W o rk e rs U n io n
UF U n ite d F o rc e
W PA W o rk in g P e o p le s A llia n c e
 Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Distinguished Professor Lewis Coser, whose image and

example inspired this effort. 1 am grateful for the advice and encouragement
he gave and for writing the foreword.
I am grateful to my wife Ann and my daughters Dionne and Tamara who
suffered my partial withdrawal from family life. Ann lovingly typed an earlier
draft of this work and toiled with me in formulating my ideas, collecting data,
and documenting material.
Professors Paget Henry, Kurt Lang, and Eugene Weinstein of the State
University of New York at Stony Brook read an earlier draft and I greatly ben-
efited by their criticism and guidance.
1 owe my good friend and colleague, Professor Aldon Morris of the De-
partment of Sociology, Michigan University, and his wife Kim much
gratitude and inspiration.
Special thanks are due to Jean Ramsaran, Don Singh, Lenise Fredericks, A1
Creighton, Elaine Small, Terence Hunte, Cora Schwartz, Loraind Wayne,
and Carmen Griffith, who in ways too numerous to mention assisted this en-
terprise.
Finally, 1 am indeed grateful to the Ford Foundation for granting funding
for my research, The Center for Inter-American Relations for providing in
their seminars a helpfully critical forum for testing my ideas, and Distin-
guished Professor Irving Louis Horowitz of Rutgers University without whom
this study might not have been published.

GEORGE K. DANNS
Georgetown, Guyana

ix
 Foreword

George K. Danns, the author of this pioneering study of the structure and
powers of the police in Guyana, has outstanding qualifications for the de-
scriptive and analytical tasks he has undertaken here. A native of Guyana,
where he received his secondary and college education, he later went to the
United States to work for a Ph.D. in sociology at the State University of New
York at Stony Brook. Having obtained his degree, he returned to his country,
where he is now a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Guyana in
Georgetown.
Given this background, George K. Danns takes advantage of the perspec-
tive of both the insider and the outsider. He knows the society he writes about
from intimate personal knowledge and involvement while he also assumes the
posture of the outside observer who avails himself of the advantage of dis-
tance. Equipped with a double vision compounded of nearness and distance he
can describe and analyze the working of the police system in Guyana and of
the society as a whole in ways that recall Tocqueville’s as well as, say, Daniel
Boorstein’s vision of the American scene.
As will be readily apparent to the reader of this remarkable study, George
K. Danns is deeply in love with his country and strongly identifies with its
well-being and development. Yet he is at the same time critical of and alien-
ated from the present authoritarian regime that controls its destiny. This com-
pound of feelings and attitudes toward his native land has led him to what
Robert K. Merton and Renee Fox have called an analytical stance of “ de-
tached concern.” Like many a surgeon, aware that overidentification with the
patient he is about to operate on would lead to inefficient performance, but
also aware that concern for the well-being of the patient is essential for effec-
tive execution of his task, Danns combines loving concern with critical de-
tachment. It is this detached concern, I believe, that makes for the remarkable
success of this work.
Many studies of Third World countries undertaken by native scholars too
often suffer from twin defects. They either tend to explain away any defects in
their country by laying all the blame on outside forces such as multinational
corporations, imperialism, or the prejudicial working of the world market; or
they engage in apologetics for the regimes that happened to be in power.
George Danns has successfully avoided both these shortcomings. He shows in
instructive detail how many of the present problems of Guyana’s society are
indeed the results of the imperialist and colonialist domination of the past, but

xi
xii Domination and Power in Guyana

he is also at pains to document that the present authoritarian regime bears a

heavy responsibility for Guyana’s predicaments.
George Danns’ study is, above all, infused by a critical spirit. This spirit
enabled him to paint so vivid a portrait, warts and all. What John Dewey once
said about the importance of a critical stance in the natural sciences applies to
the social sciences as well. As he wrote in Experience and Nature (Chicago,
Open Court, 1925, p. 442), “ To note, register and define the constituent
structure of nature is not . . . an affair neutral to the office of criticism. It is a
preliminary outline of the field of criticism, whose chief import is to afford
understanding of the necessity and nature of the office of intelligence.”
George Danns’ detached concern and critical stance have enabled him to pre-
sent an anatomy of the police system as well as the wider structures of power
in Guyana that help illuminate not only the workings of domination and power
in his society but in many other Third World countries as well.
Danns’ choice of the police as his chief object of inquiry shows that he has a
fine instinct for the jugular. Many other institutions would no doubt have af-
forded important insights into the workings of Guyanese society, but the
police and the related paramilitary and military organizations that have devel-
oped there in recent years are at the center of the structure of domination in
Guyana. The locus of power lies within the centralized state apparatus of
which the police is a major constitutent, even though this state apparatus is in
turn largely dominated by the ruling authoritarian party led by Prime Minister
Forbes Burnham.
George Danns was well aware of the centrality of the police when he
undertook his study. “ The police,” he writes, “ mirrors the relationships be-
tween rulers and ruled and presents a lively laboratory for understanding the
changes occurring in and problems being faced by a society. This study of the
police was at one and the same time of Guyanese society. It was impossible to
otherwise meaningfully understand the police without a prior understanding of
the society that cradles it.”
Both tasks, the detailed analytical study of the structure and functions of the
police and related paramilitary and military institutions in Guyanese society,
and the parallel investigation of the relations between the structure of domina-
tion and the political system of party control have been accomplished with
consummate skill in this pathbreaking study. George Danns is a new voice
among scholars concerned with the Third World. I am sure that it will be
heard. He will, I believe, soon move into the forefront of scholars concerned
with the trials and tribulations of many countries struggling to emerge from
the colonialist domination and authoritarian repression into dignified and free
members of the world community of nations.

Lewis A.Coser
Stony Brook, New York
 Preface

This book is an effort to analyze and explain the emerging system of domina-
tion and the exercise of power in the Third World society of Guyana. Emerg-
ing from a past of authoritarian colonial rule, what is the peculiar nature of in-
digenous domination in this postcolonial society?
Within Guyanese society, the locus of power is found within the centralized
state apparatus. The police is treated as an intimate bureaucratic arm of the
state system, which reflects in no uncertain terms the relations between rulers
and ruled, the dominant and the dominated, and the use and abuse of power.
A study of the police therefore provides a solid empirical indicator for ex-
plaining not only the issues of power and domination, but also serves as a
lively social laboratory for understanding the society as a whole.
The police is particularly interesting in that while it is an agent of coercion
and social control, it is itself controlled and coerced by a powerful civilian
political directorate. The organizational peculiarities and inadequacies of the
police are quite similar to that in other state institutions. The police is one of
four military institutions with strikingly similar roles and functions. Their task
is as much to sustain the authoritarian rule of the incumbent regime as it is to
be “ leaders” in an increasingly militarized society and “ builders of the na-
tion” by virtue of their mandate to engage in compulsory economic produc-
tion.
Guyana is perhaps best known internationally for the infamous Jonestown
suicide tragedy which occurred in its northwest region in November 1978. It
is a small country (83,000 square miles) with a population of about 800,000.
A former colony of Great Britain, Guyana is the only English-speaking coun-
try on the mainland of South America, but it is culturally identified with the
Commonwealth Caribbean.
This small nation has been entitled a Cooperative Socialist Republic by the
incumbent regime, which has pursued a radical foreign policy program. The
country hosted the first conference of nonaligned nations; it intiated and
hosted the Caribbean Festival of Creative Arts (CARIFESTA); spearheaded
the establishment of a regional economic integration movement (CARICOM);
is a founding member of the International Bauxite Association (IBA); and,
domestically, nationalized foreign and local enterprises to the extent where 80
percent of the economy is now owned by the state.
Radical foreign policy objectives, a concocted socialist philosophy, and a
seemingly progressive approach by the ruling regime to reduce international

xiii
XIV Domination and Power in Guyana

dependency tell us nothing about the domestic relations of the society. Is the
regime popular with the Guyanese people or is its rule illegitimate? The
Jonestown tragedy attests to the highhanded rule of the regime. Over 98 per-
cent of the Guyanese people became aware of the Jonestown commune of
foreign settlers only after news of the tragedy was released. To date, no for-
mal inquiry has been set up by the government. Most Guyanese are still un-
sure about what transpired and are indignant that the government granted land
and other concessions to a commune of foreigners without the local people
being made aware. A serious crisis of accountability exists in general in
Guyana. The regime, strongly supported by the police and the military, is
very unpopular with the masses of people and does not feel compelled to ac-
count to the masses for the policies it pursues.
The climate of authoritarian rule is, however, coupled in a curious way with
a climate of genuine concern by the regime for the well-being of the people.
Policies for development are so far unsuccessful and are being operationalized
by inept or else uncommitted state bureaucratic officials. At best, a regime
feverently dependent on its police-military coercive apparatus can only be re-
garded with “ sympathetic pessimism.”
 CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

WHEN THE AXE CAME INTO THE FOREST,

THE TREES SAID:
THE HANDLE IS ONE OF US.

Turkish Proverb

The peculiar nature of colonial experience in Guyanese society has had a

profound and transformative effect on transplanted social institutions in gen-
eral and the police in particular. Public institutions like the police are not indi-
genous to societies in the Caribbean, but are bureaucratic transplants into
milieux with unusual social origins and social structures. Public bureaucracies
were an authoritarian and repressive imposition on the people during the colo-
nial era and had as their explicit purpose the conquest, control, subjugation,
and exploitation of the colonized. They were immediately perceived and
reacted to as illegitimate authority structures. The prominence and visibility of
the police earned them the wrath and fear of the colonized perhaps more than
any other public institution. Contrary to the liberal perspective, the police as a
public institution in a colonial society did not “ exist to serve the needs and
expectation of society” (Bent 1974).
My primary concern is with the police as a bureaucratic inheritance. How-
ever, since Guyana became independent less than two decades ago, the colo-
nial experience will be drawn upon for purposes of comparison and explana-
tion of the present. The apparatus of the colonial state were handed over to the
ex-colonized. It is of interest to ascertain in what ways, if any, state bureauc-
racies have been transformed by the new and emergent social order. How
have the contemporary structure and functioning of the Guyanese police been
affected? In what ways are the roles and functionings of the police in the post-
colonial society different from that of the police in metropolitan countries?
The bulk of available studies on the police has been carried out in these ad-
vanced industrial capitalist nations.

1
2 Domination and Power in Guyana

Review of the Literature on the Police

According to Allan Bent (1974), the police is an arm of government whose

creation and existence is necessitated by the imperfections of human behavior.
The police is viewed as a “ control agency of last resort” made obligatory by
the inadequacies of primary agents of social control, like the family, the
church, the school, and peer groups. Further, the heterogeneity and size of
urban society are seen as resulting in disagreement about norms of behavior,
which compels the imposition of norms on the population by the designated
agency of social control: the police. Bent postulates:

If men were perfect there would be no need for formal agencies to guard against
human behavior detrimental to the lives, property, and well-being of society.
But the human race is not made up of angels; it depends on the civilizing influ-
ences of the family, the church, schools, and other institutions to regulate be-
havior. And where these institutions prove inadequate or incapable of fulfilling
their role, especially amid the socially dysfunctional stresses of an urban so-
ciety, the maintenance of order and safety necessitates the creation of police
agencies by the state (1974:1).

Bent’s position epitomizes what will be later described as the liberal/

conservative view of the police. He contends further that as an agency for so-
cial control the police is a functional necessity in both totalitarian and demo-
cratic states. In totalitarian states, the maintenance of order is paramount over
individual freedom and justice, while in democratic states the police is placed
in the dilemma of preserving order within the letter of the law and, at the same
time, maintaining the democratic imperative of personal freedom. “ The li-
cence to deprive any citizen of his freedom and to use force—even deadly
force— while acting in an official capacity gives every police officer an awe-
some authority” (1974:1). The police is an extraordinary bureaucracy and the
unusual amount of bureaucratic power allocated the police is essential because
of its role in maintaining the political authority, in the preservation of the
state.
As a significant official bureaucracy, Bent declares, the police displays a
unique range of characteristics:12

1. Symbolic personification o f the political system. The policeman at the

street level not only symbolizes the authority of the state by allocating and
distributing order in the community according to cuturally and legally de-
fined norms of proper behavior, but he also possesses the capacity to de-
cide which acts violate these norms.
2. Visibility. The policeman is the most conspicuous of all front-line
bureaucrats and is the omnipresent symbol of governmental authority.
 Introduction 3

3. Multiplicity o f functions. The wide variety of service functions performed

by the police aid in fulfillment of community life. The police has gone far
beyond just being responsible for law enforcement and now helps fill the
vacuum created by the breakdown of more specialized agencies of social
control by acting as their surrogates.
4. Discretion in performance. The patrolman on beat duty becomes a poli-
cy-forming administrator in miniature, “ Who operates beyond the scope
of the usual devices for control.” Furthermore, the police have employed
“ job action” tactics—strike, slow down, over-enforcement, or the “ blue
flu” —that ignore or fail to support the implementation of public policy or
vitiate the law.
5. Monopoly on legitimate use of force. As the internal enforcement arm of
the state, the police maintain a monopoly on the legitimate means of vio-
lence. The police have the power to use coercion in the arrest process, and
the use of violence in making arrests is within the discretionary authority
of every police officer. The use of violence as a legitimate means of law
enforcement has not only served the police in their function of crime pre-
vention and control, but also historically made police action the source of
riots and crime (Bent 1974:2-4).

There is much to recommend in Bent’s typification of the nature and func-

tioning of the police. Bent’s description of the role of police seems in many
instances to be quite similar if not identical to the role taken in this study.
There are, however, fundamental areas of difference which make the apparent
similarities little more than superficial. First, Bent sees the imperfections of
human nature and the inadequacies of primary socialization agents as neces-
sitating the police as a surrogate agency for social control and maintenance of
social order. The experience of the colonial Caribbean societies1 reveals,
however, that the police was set up with the expressed intent of subjugating
the colonized and repressing any actions they took to reduce the conditions of
their suffering and exploitation (Danns 1979). It was not the frailties of human
nature nor the inadequacies of primary socialization agencies (since these
were scarce and emergent features in plantation slavery and indentured society
among the dominated), but rather the imperative of maintaining a system of
color-class and color-caste domination and exploitation that necessitated the
police. More so, the police did not emerge naturally, but rather was an insti-
tutional transplant from the imperial society.
In the second place, colonial societies in the Caribbean could neither have
been classified as urban nor industrial. Urban centers were little more than
what has been described as “ urban village communities” (Matthews & Danns
1979:45). Further, Beckford (1972) aptly identified Caribbean societies as
having not industrial but plantation economies. In the Caribbean, the modem
4 Domination and Power in Guyana

police is not an urban industrial phenomenon but a coercive bureaucratic im-

position. The police functioned not so much to repress crime but to repress the
colonized masses.
Third, this liberal/conservative model assumes the existence of a demo-
cratic society. Bent focused his study on the role of the police in the United
States, an advanced industrial metropolitan society he regards as the bastion
of democracy. Elsewhere (Danns 1978) the undemocratic and authoritarian
nature of both colonial and postcolonial societies in the Caribbean has been
pointed out. Further, these societies are underdeveloped and dependent on
metropolitan countries. The role of the police must then be understood in
terms of these very different circumstances. It is not that “ a society gets the
police it deserves,” rather, that the nature and functioning of the police varies
within different societies.
The assumption of a democratic polity leads to the unquestioning accep-
tance of the legitimacy of the state system. The state is viewed as governing in
the interest and for the good of all. Again, this liberal/conservative view is
contrary to the illegitimacy of the colonial state and the crises of legitimacy
and credibility faced by postcolonial state systems in the Caribbean (Danns
1979). The colonial governments in the Caribbean were not acceptable to the
colonized, and the management of the postcolonial state systems is at present
viewed as far from satisfactory by the majority of citizens.
Fourth, the police is conceptualized as an extraordinary bureaucracy that
encapsulates state power in its rawest form; the policeman is said to possess
inordinate authority and much personal discretion to use such authority. The
unlawful or imprudent use of such authority by the individual policeman can
violate the rights of the citizen. In this approach the individual cop or patrol-
man is portrayed as the symbolic scapegoat for any undemocratic act or prac-
tice of the police organization in particular and the state system in general. In
looking at the activities of the police in colonial Guyana and their pattern of
collective repression as the coercive arm of an authoritarian and illegitimate
colonial state system, it becomes difficult to place culpability for undemo-
cratic practices at the door of the individual policeman (Danns 1979). It is not
that the policeman does not possess powers of arrest and the authority to re-
strain behavior even to the point of taking lives, it is rather that he himself is a
bureaucratic official whose actions are generally highly visible and are invari-
ably sanctioned by the norms of an official environment. The police in both
colonial and postcolonial society largely functions in accordance with the ex-
pectations of the state elites and the ruling class.
Finally, the state, of which the police is a part, is not seen within the
liberal/conservative model as an instrument of a ruling class in capitalist so-
ciety but as a neutral and benevolent agency whose imperfections can be attri-
buted to the fallibility of officials rather than any imperfections within the
 Introduction 5

system itself. The issue here is not to engage in a polemic or a vitriolic diatribe
with the liberal/conservative model in general, and Bent in particular, over the
understanding of the American society or other industrial capitalist societies
on the role of the state. Rather, the intent is to point to the inadequacies of the
liberal/conservative model in terms of affording an explanatory understanding
of the role of the police and the state. The police and the state in the Caribbean
region in general and Guyana in particular are instruments of a ruling class.
Neither the state nor the police as part thereof can be seen as a neutral agency
nor as necessarily functioning in benign benevolence in the interest of all.
The Role o f the Police
Norman Weiner (1976) in a comprehensive study of “ The Role of the
Police in Urban Society” defined the concept role as “ a set of expectations
for the behavior of the incumbent of a social position. By social position 1
mean the location of an actor in the social system” (1976:42). Weiner iden-
tified “ seven aspects” of the role of the police in society, none of which are
mutually exclusive. These are: (1) law enforcement, (2) order maintenance,
(3) performance of services, (4) support of the dominant group, (5) symbol of
authority, (6) buffer between the people and the power structure, and (7) mea-
sure of social tolerance.
The most common conception of the role of the policeman is that of law
enforcer. The police are generally regarded as enforcers of the criminal law in
particular (Lohman 1970; Reiss 1971; Wilson 1968). Most studies of the
police show that the police themselves regard this as their primary' function
and describe themselves as law enforcement officers. As William Westley
noted, “ law enforcement is the legal job of the police” (1970:140). The
police are responsible for enforcing legal norms as opposed to conduct norms
(informal but accepted patterns of behavior). The legal norms are sometimes
not coincidental with conduct norms and very often might be diametrically
opposed to them, particularly in societies where illegitimate state systems
make and enforce laws. This is particularly true of colonial society where laws
are both repressive and regulative measures and symbolize not consensus
within the social system but conflict stemming from exploitation.
The maintenance of social order is another fundamental aspect of the role of
the police (Reiss 1971; Alex 1969; Silver 1967; Skolnick 1966; Westley 1970;
Wilson 1968). Wilson categorically states:

The patrolman’s role is defined more by his responsibility for maintaining order
than by his responsibility for enforcing law. By “ order" is meant the absence of
disorder and by disorder is meant behavior that either disturbs or threatens to
disturb the public peace or that involves face-to-face conflict between two or
more persons. Disorder, in short, involves a dispute over what is “ right” . . . .
To the patrolman, enforcing the law is what he does when there is no dispute
6 Domination and Power in Guyana

when making an arrest or issuing a summons exhausts his responsibility

(1968:16-17).

In making the distinction between law and order, Wilson argues that while
enforcing law is a difficult task, it is a fairly unambiguous one involving
clearly defined acts such as murder, speeding, and theft. Maintaining order,
however, is a considerably more difficult proposition because it involves an
unidentified social condition—that of public order. Consequently, Wilson
concludes that the police must resort to law among other things to manage
disorder. Skolnick, however, advances the argument that law is not merely an
instrument of order, but may frequently be its adversary. He asserts that “ law
and order are frequently found to be in opposition, because law implies ra-
tional restraint upon the rules and procedures utilized to achieve order”
(1966:7,9). Weiner is quick to add that “ when order is the overriding concern
law may be ignored or abused, as in the situation with totalitarian regimes in
Nazi Germany. In our society, however, the quest for order is supposed to be
constrained by the rule of law, i.e., law regulating police discretion, arrest,
detention, questioning, search and seizure. It is the rule of law that keeps a so-
ciety from becoming a Police state” (1976:11). The existence of any am-
biguity in laws as rules of restraint facilitates their being “ abused” in that
“ they strengthen the very conduct they are intended to re strain .... The
policeman . . . is likely to utilize the ambiguity of the rules . . . as a justifica-
tion f o r . . . violating them (Skolnick 1966:12).
Because of the undefined and unclear nature of situations of disorder, the
police are often confronted with their greatest danger and require greater dis-
cretion in matters concerning life and death. Many studies of the police have
shown that a larger proportion of police man-hours are concerned with order
maintenance than with law enforcement. Wilson (1968) discovered that in
Syracuse, New York, 30 percent of all police calls were for order maintenance
while only 10 percent were for law enforcement. In Chicago, Reiss (1971) ob-
served that 22 percent of the calls to the police were concerned with law en-
forcement, while the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Ad-
ministration of Justice noted that 32 percent of the Kansas City patrolmen’s
time was taken up with criminal matters. In Guyana, it was found that main-
taining order was the paramount function of the police and that the rule of law
was hardly a consideration, particularly during the heyday of colonial rule
(Danns 1979). Present indications are that criminal matters occupy a small
percentage of police time and resources and that order maintenance is a more
dominant function. A survey of the International Association of Chiefs of
Police found that “ the percentage of the police effort devoted to the traditional
criminal matters probably does not exceed ten percent” (Myren & Swanson
1961:4).
 Introduction 7

The performance of community services constitutes another aspect of the

role of the police. Ambulance runs and recovering lost persons, property, and
criminals are some of the multiple services carried out by the police. In
Guyana, police also act as postal agents, issue licences and certificates for
vehicular fitness, and perform community leadership tasks like organizing
youth clubs and entertaining crowds and audiences with musical and athletic
displays. They also engage in self-help efforts and community development
projects. Wilson found that 40 percent of police mobilization was for service
calls and Reiss found that in another city in the United States it was about 60
percent, which indicates that performance of service functions and order
maintenance demands more of police energies than enforcing law.
Weiner (1976) is of the view that the service aspect of the police role is
highly important because the police can come in contact with more citizens in
a helping, nonpunitive way, and that this function takes them into the every-
day life of citizens— into matters of life and death, personal joys and tragedies
nessitating the police to be a “ medic, psychologist, social worker, human re-
lations and race relations expert, marriage consellor, youth advisor” (Clark
1971:121-22). Weiner sees the police as being particularly helpful to the
lower socioeconomic segments of the society who might otherwise have to do
without such services.
It was Cummings et al. (1965), however, who provided explanations for
police service functions: (1) police are available everywhere 24 hours a day
when other services may not be available, (2) social services to the poor are
lacking and as visible agents of society the police assist where possible, and
(3) even where social services are available, people (and police) may not
know of their existence or else do not have ready access to them. The respon-
sibilty for providing social services thus falls to the police somewhat by de-
fault. The police is empowered to intervene in our private lives and to affect
them either positively or negatively. As Egan Bittner puts it, the police has the
ability to employ a “ nonnegotiably coercive force,” which does not have to
be explained to anyone and cannot be opposed by anyone (1970:41). The
police can intervene in a situation without being asked to do so by the partici-
pants and with little likelihood that the participants can effectively retaliate
against them (Weiner 1976:12).
Support for the dominant group is another aspect of the police role iden-
tified by Weiner, who states that “ it is the role of the police to impose on
others, no matter how subtle the perspective of the dominant group”
(1976:12). Joseph Lohman declared “ the police function is to support and
enforce the interests of the dominant political, social and economic interests
of the town, and only incidentally to support the law” (1970a). Marvin Wol-
fang asserted that police “ are the executors of middle class values reflected in
the criminal law and community norms of right and wrong conduct. They are
8 Domination and Power in Guyana

the front line reconnaissance troops of these values; their functional role is to
discover, detect, and defer deviance from those values, while protecting vul-
nerable victims from the offensiveness of others” (1968:459-69). Allan Silver
(1967) argued that this function of the police affects all others and that even
the performance of social services is governed by the interests of dominant
interests in society.
Weiner urges that “ it is important to remember that this aspect of the police
role— imposing the perspective of the dominant group—has always been a
primary one” (1976:13). Several studies examining the historical emergence
of the police in the United States noted that the police were reorganized fol-
lowing immigrant riots in the mid-1800s and that for many years afterwards
they protected the homes of the well-to-do from the dangerous classes, de-
fended management in industrial strikes, and attacked blacks during race riots
(Graham & Gurr 1969; Parks 1970; Platt & Cooper 1974). In Britain, too,
Algernon Black (1968) recalls that people were opposed to the establishment
of a police force because of the memory of the spy and terrorist activities of
the French police prior to the 1700s.

Historically the police have almost always been a reactionary force defending
the king and emperor, the nobility and aristocracy, the institutions of property
and repression. Historically they are identified with the upper classes and
against the masses. Normally they would tend to defend the employers and the
factory against the workers and the unions, the landlords against the tenants, and
in Western culture the white people and their power and privilege against those
who challenge these (Black 1968).

Black’s historical findings are quite reminiscent of the colonial experience

and very much in accord with the position taken in this study of the police
being the instrument of authoritarian and repressive state rule and of the
dominant economic interests in Guyanese society. Weiner concludes this as-
pect of the police role by pointing out that “ if we view law as fashioned by
those segments of society with political power, then law enforcement must in-
evitably entail imposing the dominant perspective, although this need not be a
repressive perspective” (1976:13).
Quite related to the role of the police in protecting dominant interests in the
society is that of being a symbol of authority and personifying the law (Alex
1969). Silver (1967) claims that the police is “ a personification of the values
of the center” while Neiderhoffer (1967) asserts that the police represents
“ the interests of the power centers in the community.” Blumberg and
Neiderhoffer declared that this symbolic authority role of the police results in
their being differently perceived by different groups in society: “ To the vast
middle mass of Americans, the police represents the somber reassurance that
their tenuous status, security, and hard won possessions will not be wrested
 Introduction 9

from t hem. . . to the lower classes the police are a symbol of repression to
control their lives” (1970:7).
The Guyana experience reveals that the police are a source of reassurance
for the propertied class and the power elites, and symbols of authoritarian rule
for the masses, thereby inhibiting the emergence of democratic institutions.
This does not mean, however, that no good is done by the police for the com-
munities they serve; indeed, as was pointed out, the deliverance of various
community services is a dominant aspect of the police role. Rather, it suggests
that various groups in society tend to focus their perceptions of the police on a
particular aspect of the total role, in accordance with its relative importance
for their everyday existence. In the United States, one study in examining mi-
nority and lower class perception of the police points to an apparent con-
tradiction in the police role:

The policeman in the ghetto is the most visible symbol. . . of a society from
which many ghetto negroes are increasingly alienated. At the same time, police
responsibilities in the ghetto are even greater than elsewhere in the community
since the other institutions . . . have so little authority: the schools . . . career as-
piration . . . the family.. . . It is the policeman who must deal with the conse-
quences of this institutional vacuum and is then resented for the presence and
measures their effort demands (Kemer 1968:300).

Weiner identifies yet another aspect of the role of the police that stems from
the two preceding functions: “ the police act as a buffer between the social and
political structure and the ‘disruptive’ elements of society, that is, the pres-
ence of the police ensures those persons who make the laws are protected by
them that they do not have to face those persons or group who challenge
them” (1976:14). Alex (1969) observed that the police do all the dirty work,
take the blows, and absorb the hostility. Blumberg (1967) asserted that politi-
cally the police are a social lightning rod. All kinds of protests directed at the
various institutional subsystems of American society invariably end up in
confrontations with the police. This aspect of the police role is particularly
conspicuous in a society with an authoritarian past and a still authoritarian
present, like Guyana.
The final aspect of the police role in Weiner’s scheme is that of serving as a
measure of social tolerance. According to Weiner:

How much sexual expression, obscenity, and freedom of speech a society is

willing to tolerate can easily be tested by passing a law, sending the police out to
enforce it, and then weighing public reaction to the enforcement. This is perhaps
most clearly illustrated when the arrest of a movie theatre owner (in response to
an ambiguous obscenity law) provokes little public outcry. The arrest stands as a
measure of social tolerance in the community (1976:15).
10 Domination and Power in Guyana

Apart from serving as a moral thermometer, the police also test the parameters
of social tolerance in their interactions with the dominated classes in society.
Reactions to the policies and rules of a state are often experienced by this its
seemingly ubiquitous arm. It is the police who must restore order and enforce
laws when they are violated by the subordinate masses or the dominated. To
this end the police serve as both a social radar and trouble shooter.
The police are structurally placed as an important arm of the overall crimi-
nal justice system. Weiner points out that in this position the police

deal with more people than any other level of the justice system, act in more
areas of people’s lives, and spend the bulk of their time and energy with the
most volatile segments of society. While they are the least visible of the justice
system in terms of public sanction, they are the most visible symbol and agent of
government and conventional morality to most people. The police filter citizen
requests to the holders of power and carry the official replies back to the
populace (1976:15).

In providing the raw material for the criminal justice system, and in filter-
ing citizen’s requests to the powers that be, the police “ exercise more latitude
and discretion in dealing with the lives and welfare of people than any other
professional group” (Blumberg & Neiderhoffer 1970:4). In the words of
Chief Justice Warren Burger, “ The policeman on the beat or in the patrol car
makes more decisions and exercises broader discretion affecting the daily
lives of people every day and to a greater extent, in many respects, than a
judge will ordinarily exercise in his work in a week” (1973:2). Authority,
then, becomes the passport of police functioning.
This begins our examination of the police role as conceptualized in the pre-
vailing literature on the police. In a partial way, attempts were made to relate
this description of the urban and metropolitan police role to the realities of
Guyana. The role of the police as described is being treated here as a sort of
“ ideal type” and was useful in terms of aiding our understanding of the phe-
nomenon of the police in society. This “ ideal type” is of further heuristic
value in arriving at an empirical formulation of the role of the police in
Guyana.

Perspective and Plan of Study

The police is treated in this study as an integral sector of the coercive mech-
anism of the state and will be empirically examined with a view toward illus-
trating the nature of rule in the Guyanese society. To highlight the present
structure and function of the police is also to provide a social commentary on
the present structure and function of the society at large. David Bayley de-
clares:
 Introduction 11

A study of the Police also provides a new vantage point for viewing contempo-
rary . . . society. Police penetrate society more completely than any other gov-
ernmental agency, and policemen see things that most private citizens do not.
Their perspective, though not representative, is no less authentic than any other.
And it may have the advantage of being more extensive. The police are also a
part of society. Because society works in them one can leant something by ob-
serving them. Borrowing from the anthropologists, the police may be regarded
as a village—not the only one but a real one nonetheless (1976).

Most contemporary studies tend to view the police as an inevitable, if not

natural part of modem society. The Center for the Research of Criminal Jus-
tice classifies holders of this perspective into two main groups: the conserva-
tive and the liberal. They are distinguished by the fact that they take the exis-
tence of the police for granted. The conservative approach sees “ the decline
in respect for authority, the breakdown of traditional values or of family disci-
pline, as the source of the need for the police, who are seen as a ‘thin blue
line’ holding back the forces of evil and destruction that lurk just beneath the
surface of civilization” (CRCJ 1975:9). This approach is championed by
police departments and in many popular movies and T.V. portrayals of the
police.
The liberal approach is found among academics and police reformers and
sees the need for police in the growing complexity and diversity of modem
society.

Liberal commentators often point to social and economic conditions—especially

poverty and unemployment—as factors underlying the crime and social disorder
that makes the police necessary. But these conditions are usually accepted in the
liberal view, as either inevitable or as problems that can only be solved in the
"long run.” In the meantime, we have to accept the basic role of the police for
the indefinite future although we can do something about correcting police
abuses and inefficiency (CRCJ 1975:9).

The liberal and conservative views see the police as an institution responsi-
ble for preventing and controlling crime and delinquency, maintaining law
and order, and controlling other malfunctions of the social system. The police
is seen by such studies as a phenomenon sui generis and its role and function,
along with its relationships with the public, are examined. Professionalism in
policing is often valued; activities by politicians in trying to influence the
police for their own ends are viewed as corrupt. Further, the police are often
typed as an interest group faced with the problem of meeting conflicting de-
mands from other interest groups and sectors of society, and trying to please,
appease, or control such groups or sectors—while at the same time maintain-
ing itself as a social institution. The average policeman is also viewed as pos-
sessing more power than other citizens by virtue of his powers of arrest and
12 Domination and Power in Guyana

detention. Moreover, as managers of the instruments of violence police offi-

cers are seen as a powerful interest group whose activities require much dis-
cretion. Finally, police are also regarded as part of the overall criminal justice
system and as the suppliers of the “ raw material” for this system.
The foregoing conservative and liberal approaches are legitimate percep-
tions and concerns of the police. However, the police are not centrally pic-
tured as being a coercive bureaucratic instrument of the ruling elite or group.
More so, the two approaches ignore, de-emphasize or define away the fact
that the police is part of the state apparatus and forms a veritable coercive pil-
lar for the maintenance of state power. It is not the concern of studies cast in
the conservative and liberal mold to detail which group in society controls the
state and on whose behalf state power is exercised.
A fundamental position of this study is that the police can only be mean-
ingfully understood and treated as part of a larger state apparatus. Further, that
state power as a whole is invariably exercised in the interests of the dominant
group or ruling elites in society. The police is an all-pervasive and very influ-
ential arm of the state apparatus and mirrors in no uncertain terms the relation-
ships between rulers and the ruled. Pointing to the relationships of the police
with politics and government and their influence on people’s lives, D.H.
Bayley stated:

There are several presumptive reasons for thinking Police can exert a formative
influence on political life at least in comparison to the contributions of other
agencies. First, they are thoroughly and widely visible since they are uniformed,
their activities are difficult to disguise, since their responsibilities permeate all
concerns of social activity, and they are brought into contact with everyone.
Second, Police possess a near monopoly on the instruments of force. They are
social regulators—this creates around them an aura of apprehension, of anxiety,
of fear. They are imbued with an emotional significance that does not attach to
other agents of government. Third, they have a responsibility for safeguarding
the most basic elements of human life. Moreover they intrude into individual
lives at moments of stress and tribulation. Fourth, police are immediately iden-
tified with law, they implement its structures and decide when it is to be applied.
Whether government is by men or by law depends to a marked extent on the
nature of the police (1969:14).

The typing of the police as an instrument for the exercise of state power
qualifies this study as an exercise in the sociology of rule or domination. It is
not that the police are not concerned with preventing or controlling crime and
bringing lawbreakers to justice, it is rather that they themselves are controlled
and do carry out these functions as part of the state and on the behalf of a rul-
ing elite. If it is important that we understand the role of the police in terms of
preventing crime and maintaining law and order, it is equally important that
we recognize the larger state system of which they are a part, whose and what
 Introduction 13

laws they maintain, and who are affected by their mandate to use force in the
maintenance of societal order.
The Police as a Coercive State Apparatus: A Historical Note
Social theorists over the ages have been embroiled in the polemic of how
men become tractable to social controls and how social order is possible
(Wrong 1961). Whether society is held together by consensus (Parsons 1937)
or by conflict (Dahrendorf 1958); or, by conflict and consensus as reciprocal
processes (Coser 1956) is not at issue. However, this Hobbesian question
might be answered—it can hardly be disputed that a fundamental function of
the state is to harness forces of disorder in a society. The mandate of the police
as a coercive apparatus of the state system in modem society is to ensure that
social order is maintained, thus diminishing the possibilities of a “ war of all
against all.”
A brief excursion into the historical origins of the police provides empirical
justification for treating the police fundamentally as a coercive arm of the state
system concerned with imposing a particularized conception of social order as
decreed by the elites or ruling class. Norman Weiner (1976) pointed out that
the modem police are an urban-industrial phenomenon that did not come into
existence until after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Police ap-
peared in London in 1829, Philadelphia in 1833, Boston in 1838, and New
York in 1844. By the 1870s the police became a formalized feature in big and
industrialized cities in the United States and Europe. However, the London
Metropolitan Police, which was established in 1829, was the world’s first
modem police force.
The establishment of the police in England in the nineteenth century came
about after a slow, halting, and painful process. Charles Reith (1938), in the
preface to his treatise on the idea of the police, noted that the police was es-
tablished only after the

breakdown of English Law in the face of the growing aggression of uncontrolla-

ble mob violence, the futile and pathetic attempts by Parliament for more than a
century to restore the power of the law by passing more laws, the failure of this
policy to avert impending and seemingly inevitable disaster, and the eventual
recognition by despairing statesmen, in the hour of crisis, that what the law re-
quired was force that would enable it to function and to save society, as a neces-
sary alternative to the use of armed force which was divorced from law.

Reith pointed out that setting up the police was an organizational solution
by the state in Britain to what was seen as the greatest contest “ between au-
thority on the one hand and the challenge of internal disorder on the other,
which has ever been waged in the course of the long history of the community
life of man” (1938:3). The breakdown of tht gemeinschaften environment of
14 Domination and Power in Guyana

the feudal estate system unleased unexpected forces of anomie and disorder
for which the state and the ruling class were unprepared. The change from
feudal to ecclesiastical-parish organization was met in other societies by the
extension of standing armies in the form of military police or gendarmerie. In
Britain, however, a local magistrate and a parish constable initially sufficed to
preserve law and order. The growth of industrial activities and the greater
density of population in the towns made these simple preventive arrangements
inadequate. Reith stated that the city of London at the beginning of the eigh-
teenth century was “ sheltering a huge submerged population who lived be-
yond the pale of what was then regarded as civilization. From them came the
menace of Crime and the menace of Mob Disorder, with increasing intensity
which fifty years later began to be recognized as a threat to the foundations of
public order and even to the existence of authority” (1938:4).
Capitalism was crystallizing its Janus-faced existence. It showed on one
side tremendous strides in the growth of material wealth and on the other a
morbid disregard for the lives and welfare of the masses—or what con-
sequently became known as the “ dangerous classes.” The discovery of gin
threw the city of London into an orgy of drunkenness.
Rubinstein explained that the

agricultural interests which dominated the House of Commons saw in gin the
opportunity to dispose profitably of the grain surpluses which the country pro-
duced and every encouragement was given to its manufacture. Within a few de-
cades, London was awash in an orgy of drinking which has probably not been
matched in history. Public drunkenness became a commonplace sight, and
drink-crazed mobs often roamed the streets through the city. The streets of Lon-
don, never safe, were now filled with people whose behavior was unpredictable
and occasionally violent. Not surprisingly the gin craze was accompanied by a
great rise in violent crimes and theft (1973:6).

The state reacted to these crises by passing laws making the death penalty
the punishment for even the pettiest crime. Some of those prosecuted were
transported as criminals to the colonies of New Zealand and Australia. The in-
ability of the parish constable and the city watchmen to deal with mass disor-
der led to magistrates reading the riot act and calling out the military, who
went about suppressing rioters with brutal savagery. Despite these preventive
measures, the malady of mass disorder persisted. Workers who became
known as Luddites rioted against the introduction of machinery, which they
saw as making their labor redundant. In 1780 the Gordon riots saw the
greatest mob violence in history and the most brutal military response. Public
sentiment and criticism strongly opposed the use of the military to procure
internal peace. The work and activities of magistrates Henry and John Field-
ing, Jeremy Bentham, Patrick Colguhoun, Edwin Chadwick, and Sir Robert
 Introduction 15

Peel soon led to the idea and formation of a “ preventive police” to stem the
tide of disorder and reduce crimes.
The idea of the police was strongly resented and seen as a threat to individ-
ual liberty and an authoritarian restraint on the activities of citizens. Such op-
positions stemmed mainly from the better organized, educated, and politically
articulate upper classes and delayed considerably the setting up of the police
until 1829. Citizens had feared that a police state in accordance with the ex-
periences of France during the ancien regime would result. The champions of
the police idea assured the populace that the police would be accountable to
the law. As F.W. Maitland (1885) reaffirmed, “ There is a large body of rules
defining crimes and punishment of those who commit them and the rights and
remedies of those who are wronged, but there is also a body of rules defining
how and by whom, and when and where, rules of the former kind can be put
in force...
Skolnick (1966) pointed out that the 1962 Royal Commission Report re-
futed the argument that a national police force would lead to the development
of a police state in Britain. The commission had contended that

British liberty does not depend, and never has depended, upon any particular
form of police organization. It depends upon the supremacy of Parliament and
on the rule of law. We do not accept the criterion of a police state is whether a
country’s police force is national rather than local—if that were the test, Bel-
gium, Denmark, and Sweden should be described as police states. The proper
criterion is whether the police is answerable to the law and, ultimately, to a
democratically elected Parliament. It is here, in our view, that the distinction is
to be found between a free and a totalitarian state. In the countries to which the
term police state is applied opprobriously, police power is controlled by the
government; but they are so called not because the police are nationally or-
ganized, but because the government acknowledges no accountability to a
democratically elected parliament, and the citizen cannot rely on the courts to
protect him. Thus in such countries the foundation upon which British Liberty
rests do not exist (Royal Commission on the Police Cmnd. 1728 p. 45).

Despite the argument that police activities are governed by the rule of law,
it cannot be denied that their establishment was motivated by the need to sup-
press and control acts of internal disorder. The function of order maintenance
was therefore the paramount imperative of the emerging police role and took
precedence over all other police functions, even that of law enforcement.
While law can be seen as “ an instrument of order” and “ the criminal law
comprises a set of rules for the maintenance of social order,” law and order
are not necessarily coterminous. As Skolnick further notes, “ the common
juxtaposition of ‘law and order’ is an over-simplification. Law is not merely
an instrument of order, but may frequently be its adversary” (1975:7). In
seeking to maintain social order the police are hard put to conform to the letter
16 Domination and Power in Guyana

of the law, and in seeking to enforce the law the police sometimes provoke
disorder. The barbaric nature of the British criminal code in the nineteenth
century (from which even children were hung for petty stealing to appease
their hunger, and public executions were common) was certainly not condu-
cive to the successful maintenance of order by the police. The introduction of
the police, however, facilitated reform of the criminal code and the ameliora-
tion of punishments inflicted for crime. The maintenance of order and the en-
forcement of law restored the integrity of authority and the fortitude of the
state. The police was now firmly established as an internal coercive arm of a
now expanded state system. The successes of this “ new” state institution led
to its adaptation by other countries in Europe and the United States, which
were also undergoing rapid industrialization.
A second but no less important motivating factor for establishment of the
police was the protection of property and the well-being of those who benefit
most from an economy based on the extraction of private profit. It was pointed
out that the police were created primarily in response to rioting and disorder
directed against oppressive working and living conditions in the emerging in-
dustrial cities. Police were used to suppress striking workers in Britain and the
United States in the industrial conflicts of the late nineteenth century and early
twentieth century. The criminal law that the police were mandated to enforce
prescribed even harsher penalties for violations to property than violations to
the person. The Luddites in Britain soon ceased their destruction of machinery
in the face of death penalties for such actions. The state in capitalist society
was an instrument of the bourgeois ruling class and was mandated with the
functions of maintaining order and tempering the manner of recalcitrant and
rebellious work forces as well as the deprived lower classes in general (CRCJ
1975).
In hisS/a/e and Revolution, Lenin saw “ the police in capitalist society as
one part—along with the military and penal system—of the apparatus of state
force and violence, which directly serves the interests of the capitalist class
and predictably harasses working class people” (CRCJ 1975). The Center for
Research and Criminal Justice (CRCJ) contended that there is considerable
evidence showing that underneath the formal structure of the criminal law
there is an unofficial but systematic pattern of selective use of the police to
coerce and intimidate oppressed people. They claim that studies of police
street practices consistently show that the police arrest more working-class
people than others. Citing Quinney (1970), they showed that middle-class
youths are likely to be let off with a reprimand for many kinds of crimes,
while working-class youths are far more likely to be formally arrested and
charged for the same offenses (CRCJ 1975:10-12).
This mandate of protecting property and upper-class interests and welfare
led the police to suppress strikers and rioters with great violence and
 Introduction 17

bloodshed, particularly in the United States. In the draft riots in New York
City in 1863 over 1,000 people mainly of working-class Irish background,
were killed. The police saw poor people as “ garbage and vermin that had to
be exterminated or swept away.” They saw their role as being essentially “ a
domestic army lined up against vicious hordes of criminals, anarchists, and
other ‘enemies of civilization’ ” (CRCJ 1975:18). It is not that the police did
not also protect the lives and property of the lower classes but rather that they
first served the interests of the ruling class. Regulation of behavior in general
was essential if a congenial climate was to be maintained for industrial
capitalist manufacture.
The formation of the police was not based on an overall social consensus.
Indeed, the police were concerned with controlling the lower classes of so-
ciety who had no say in their establishment. The police were set up to bolster
the state apparatus in preserving social order and maintaining the law, largely
in the interests of the dominant social classes that control the state. Raymond
Fosdick noted the absence of public accountability in the first modem police
force formed in metropolitan London:

No machinery exists by means of which the police can be popularly controlled,

or the preference of the people in respect to them effectively expressed. They
cannot be made a local political issue. Except through the pressure of public
opinion, the citizens of London are voiceless in the management of their police
(1915:42).

Despite the fact that the citizens of London finance the police through their
taxes, they are powerless to regulate police behavior. Fosdick (1915) noted
that similar autocratic conduct by the police is permitted by the state and the
ruling class in other European cities, particularly Germany where in some
matters the police fulfilled the functions of the entire judicial system, having
the powers to arrest, charge, place on trial and fine or in other ways punish
citizens for what they perceive to be misdemeanors.2 Such actions, Fosdick
concluded, “ undoubtedly contributes to the bitter antagonism to the police
common among the lower classes of Germany and Austria” (1915:35).
As a former West Indian colony of Britain, Guyana was the recipient of a
synthetic social structure constructed out of the importation of peoples and in-
stitutions. The indigenous aboriginal peoples, known as Amerindians, were
few in number and nomadic in their settlement patterns. In the face of the
conquering onslaught of European settlers to enslave or exterminate them,
they withdrew into the innermost forested regions. Blacks were imported from
Africa and enslaved. The Amerindian tribes were encouraged by the European
colonizers to function as the “ police of the interior” by recapturing runaway
slaves who fled into the forested regions and assisting in suppressing slave
uprisings. For their policing efforts, the Amerindians were given “ blue drill,
18 Domination and Power in Guyana

combs, corals, mouth organs, and looking glasses as payment” as well as

“ staves of office” as a symbol of their relationship with the colonial au-
thorities (Menezes 1977). The abolition of slavery saw the importation of
Chinese from China, Portuguese from Madeira and the Cayman Islands, and
Indians (known as East Indians) from India as indentured labor forces to man
sugar plantations in place of the deserting black ex-slave population.
In the early and formative stages of the colony policing was designed to
repress and control a large recalcitrant slave labor population within the sugar
plantations. The problem was to produce compliance of the black slaves under
conditions of harsh labor and inhumane treatment. Order was seen as being
kept if the colonial state with the aid of the military, the Amerindians, and
other policing agencies set up by the planters was successful in providing an
atmosphere conducive to the monocrop production and export. A colony was
not a society, nor was it seen as a country. It was instead an economic haven
for the exploitation of colonized peoples and raw materials for the benefit of
some metropolitan power. The problem of order and order maintenance in a
colony is neither a democratic proposition nor a philosophical issue. Neither is
it based on any “ social contract” or the moderating presence of any
“ Leviathan.” Put simply, order maintenance in a colony is a repressive im-
position, a nonnegotiable, inhumane contract designed specifically with the
idea of the exploitation of many by a few. The answer to the Hobbesian ques-
tion, “ How is society possible?” in the light of the colonial experience does
not require philosophical speculations or theoretical conjecturings. The an-
swer, simply put, is that order is possible through conquest, subjugation, and
exploitation.
The police force as an institutionalized body was established in the colony
of British Guiana in 1839 by “ an ordinance to establish an effective system of
police within British Guiana.” Setting up a formal police organization in
British Guiana was in keeping with a broader British colonial policy based on
the coming emancipation of slaves in the colonies and on its own experience
ten years earlier of the necessity for a police body. The acceptance and suc-
cess of the police principles in Britain have deeply influenced the function and
status of the police in colonial territories, although the actual development of
colonial police forces has necessarily followed different lines. Charles Jef-
fries, writing on the colonial police, explained:

These forces, while now officially constituted as civilian bodies, have certain
military characteristics which arc not possessed by the U.K. police forces. They
differ also from the U.K. forces in that the police of each colonial territory are
an organ of the central government, and are not, as in this country split up into
separate units under local authorities (1952:26).

The origin and development of the colonial police in Guyana must be seen
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