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Apr 12, 2016 News
‘Unit has outlived its usefulness’ – Commissioner of Police
Head of the Strategic Management Department (SMD) of the Guyana Police Force, Patrick Mentore, is alleging
that the organization has been repeatedly ignoring important advice with regard to the much needed police reform.
Mentore was responding to comments attributed to Commissioner of Police Seelall Persaud in another section of the media.
According to reports, the Commissioner contended that the SMD has outlived its usefulness. And if his desire becomes a reality, come next month end, the SMD will no longer exist.
This newspaper understands that Minister of Public Security Khemraj Ramjattan has assented to the Commissioner’s call for the disbandment of the civilian unit.
The SMD is a civilian entity that was established three years ago by the then Ministry of Home Affairs, to provide an oversight for the implementation of the Guyana Police Force’s Strategic Plan.
It is headed by former Assistant Superintendent of Police Patrick Mentore, who last served at the Tactical Services Unit following a two-year stint as the first Public Relations and Press Officer of the GPF.
Mentore told this newspaper that he is quite aware that the top brass of the force was never comfortable with the civilian oversight body. As such, it has been turning a deaf ear to most of its recommendations, which according to the SMD head, would have redounded to the benefit of the force and the Guyanese
taxpayers as well.
Commissioner Persaud is quoted in a recent media report as suggesting, strongly, that Mentore’s experience and approach were inappropriate.
“He has served in the Force for some time and I don’t think he has been involved in much frontline kind of duty. That would have been quite a while back and so the current contemporary issues are different,” Persaud told the media.
In an interview with this newspaper on March 29 last, Mentore had explained that, according to his understanding, the civilian-staffed SMD was established to, among other tasks, formulate the Force’s strategic plan, and to facilitate the implementation of that plan to ensure delivery of the agreed outputs and outcomes through performance monitoring and evaluation.
The Head further said that prior to the department’s formation some consultancy work was done by the UK-based Julian Laite Consulting Firm which found that not much had been done to implement strategies partly because the delivery plan was not sufficiently linked to Divisional and Unit plans, and partly because the Force did not have the capacity or processes to drive through the desired changes.
It was the opinion of the consultants that one of the serious challenges facing the GPF was the organisation’s inability to achieve the deliverables of the Strategic Plan.
Mentore attempted to “clear up a certain misconception” about the SMD’s role in rolling out the police
reforms by pointing out that the urgently needed reforms must be encompassed and guided within a well-defined and widely disseminated framework.
This, he argued, must reflect the police executive’s future vision of a positively transformed GPF.
He posited that to think otherwise would be to arrogate to his department an authority it was never expected to assume.
Mentore offered that notwithstanding the limitations of its role with respect to reform, the SMD was very proactive since its formation and identified several documents which were submitted to the Force administration in that regard.
He said that he personally contacted Julian Laite in the UK and was able to source several very important documents which he shared with the Commissioner of Police and the senior officers leading the five strategic priority areas. However, because of a perceived need and largely by self-initiating efforts, the SMD was able to produce several proposal and other documents including
(i) Guidelines: Crowd Management and Control;
(ii) Draft Road Traffic Strategic Plan 2013-2017;
(iii) Guidelines for Examining and Certifying Officers;
(iv) After Action Review Template; Terms of Reference for the Executive Leadership Team Secretariat;
(v) Draft GPF Strategy for Dealing with Gangs and
(vi) Draft Juvenile Liaison Scheme process and procedure’.
He said that the initiatives that the SMD took were aimed at adding value to police reform efforts.
In response to a question of whether the GPF had taken the department’s proposals and recommendations on board, Mentore said that it would be unreasonable to expect that the thought, time and effort taken to research and compile documents of serious relevance to the Force would be left to gather dust.
When asked about the current capacity of the GPF to apply strategic management to policing, he explained that a whole lot more needs to be done since strategic management has not been a traditional police management approach in Guyana.
He would like to see officers and ranks adopt that approach in the administration and operations of the GPF since the higher officers’ rise in the Force, the more strategic thinking and approaches are required.
However, based upon the experiences of the SMD, Mentore was not overly optimistic about officers operating within a power structured GPF, having a technical recommendation accepted particularly if it does not accord with preconceived notions of those higher up the leadership ladder.
“Officers placed in such a situation would have no option but to quietly swallow the rejection and slink away without the benefit of a hearing of the rationale for the recommendation,” Mentore told this newspaper.
Mentore, who is a prolific letter writer on matters pertaining to law enforcement and police reform in general, shared some thoughts on the way forward for policing in Guyana. He suggested that effective internal and external communication processes should be developed to promote the aims and objectives of the reform programme.
In that regard he felt that the policy boards should begin working to address policy change demands within the Force in keeping with its reform and modernisation thrust. He argued that without policies to serve as guidelines, members of the GPF may not know the direction or intent of the Force’s executive leaders.
Mentore feels that the organisation is at the stage where it needs to cultivate and reinforce a culture of documenting strategies and activities and electronically storing these in a manner for easy access, retrieval, and scrutiny.
The Head of Department feels that senior officers should develop coaching and mentoring skills to motivate and develop their subordinates to become more operationally proficient.
This he said is a key performance management skill which should not be ignored.
The former Public Relations and Press Officer holds the view that the GPF should establish a plan for contributing to public discussions including appearances as guests on radio or television talk shows; writing feature articles for publication in the daily newspapers; write informative (not provocative) Letters to the Editor if the Force’s perspective is misrepresented or unrepresented in an article, or in another Letter to the Editor.
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