The Guyana Police Force ended 2025 with statistics it was proud to announce. Commissioner of Police Clifton Hicken reported a 61.7 percent crime clearance rate, a 25.2 percent reduction in serious crimes, and the lowest serious crime figures recorded in a decade. On paper, those are meaningful numbers. On the ground, in the yards, neighbourhoods, and communities where ordinary Guyanese live, the experience of policing tells a very different story.
The gap between what the GPF reports and what citizens experience has become one of the most corrosive sources of public distrust in Guyana. It is not simply that crime exists. It is that when people reach out to the police, they are routinely met with indifference, delay, denial, or nothing at all.
The most fundamental complaint heard consistently across communities is that when a citizen goes to a police station to file a report, they are frequently sent away with nothing to show for it. No copy of their report. No reference number. No confirmation that anything was recorded. In many documented cases, citizens who later followed up were told by officers that no such report existed. This is not a minor administrative inconvenience. It is a mechanism by which the police deny accountability to the people they are sworn to serve. If a report is not confirmed in writing, it effectively did not happen, and the officer who refused to record it faces no consequence.
The 911 emergency system, which exists to connect citizens to urgent police response, has become a source of community frustration rather than confidence. Calls go unanswered for hours. In some cases, response arrives the following day, if at all. Meanwhile, Guyanese watch vehicle after vehicle being donated to the Force at public ceremonies, with commissioners and ministers photographed alongside gleaming new patrol cars. The question the public is entitled to ask is straightforward: where are those vehicles, and what are they doing between the hours that crime is most likely to occur?
Visible patrol, meaning uniformed officers moving through communities on foot or by vehicle during evening and overnight hours, is near absent in many areas outside the capital. Ranks are concentrated at stations, and while internal operational reasons may partly explain this, the effect on public safety and public perception is the same. Citizens do not feel protected, and criminals are well aware of where the police are and where they are not.
Equally damaging is the culture of no follow-up. A complaint made today has no guaranteed pathway to resolution tomorrow. There is no system by which a citizen can track what became of their report, who was assigned to it, what steps were taken, or why it was closed. The officer who took the complaint moves on. The supervisor who should ensure follow-through does not. And the complainant, having heard nothing for weeks, concludes what most have long since concluded: that filing a police report is an exercise in futility.
These failures are not inevitable. They are institutional, and they are correctable. The following reforms should be implemented without delay.
Every person who files a complaint at any police station in Guyana must receive, before leaving the station, a written acknowledgement slip. That slip must include the date and time the report was received, the full name, rank, and badge number of the officer who received it, a unique report reference number, and a contact number for the station. This slip is the citizen’s proof that the state received their complaint. It also creates an immediate paper trail that supervisors and oversight bodies can audit. An officer who denies receiving a report cannot do so if the complainant is holding a signed slip.
Station commanders must be made directly accountable for the investigation status of every complaint filed at their station. A weekly review of open complaints should be mandatory, with unresolved matters escalating to divisional commanders after a defined period. The current culture in which complaints disappear into a filing system with no assigned officer and no deadline must end. Accountability that stops at the frontline constable means accountability that stops nowhere.
The 911 system must be resourced and monitored as the emergency infrastructure it is. Response time targets must be published, measured, and reported publicly on a monthly basis by division. When a call is made and response does not arrive within a defined window, that incident must be logged, reviewed, and explained. Citizens who call 911 and receive no response within a reasonable time should have a clear pathway to file a formal complaint against the division, not the individual officer, so that pattern failures can be identified.
Patrol deployment records must be made available to divisional oversight bodies. If the Force is receiving vehicles through government allocations and international donations, the public is entitled to know how those vehicles are being deployed, what routes they cover, at what hours, and with what frequency. Deployment plans should be reviewed quarterly against crime pattern data so that patrol resources follow risk, not convenience.
Finally, an independent Police Complaints Authority with real investigative powers, subpoena authority, and the ability to recommend prosecution must be established by legislation. The current internal discipline system, where the Force investigates itself, does not inspire confidence and should not be expected to. Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and Barbados all have civilian oversight mechanisms for police complaints. Guyana, with a force that recorded 130 murders in 2025 and 20 of its own ranks before the courts in the same year, needs one urgently.
The GPF’s statistics show that the institution is capable of improvement. The murder rate rising by 11.1 percent in 2025 even as overall serious crime fell shows that the improvement is uneven and fragile. The public’s confidence will not be rebuilt by press releases or vehicle handover ceremonies. It will be rebuilt when the person who walks into a police station with a complaint walks out with a piece of paper that proves someone in authority heard them, and when that piece of paper leads to something.
SOURCE: Guyana1news
