Please see Press Release-
Minister of Legal Affairs and Attorney General, Hon. Anil Nandlall, SC, on Monday September 13, 2022 handed over a number of computer systems along with printers and scanners to the Guyana Police Force. The equipment is expected to be distributed to the various Court Superintendent Offices throughout the Force as an added boost to aid and boost their operations.
The thirty-eight pieces of computer systems, printers and scanners along with a number of air conditioning units, which has a total value of seventeen million dollars (G$17M) were handed over by the Attorney General to Deputy Commissioner ‘Administration’ (ag.) Mr. Calvin Brutus in the Commissioner’s Conference Room at Eve Leary, Georgetown.
Nandlall, in his remarks during the handing over ceremony, highlighted that the equipment were donated through the ‘Support for Criminal Justice Project’ funded by the Inter-American Development Bank and is aimed at enhancing the Force’s prosecutorial and investigative capabilities.
“The Support for Criminal Justice Project is an IDB funded initiative being administered by the Ministry of Legal Affairs on behalf of the Government of Guyana,” he noted.
“A significant component of the project has to do with assisting and enhancing the capability of the Guyana Police Force, in particular, in its prosecutorial and investigative duties because those duties are intimately connected with the administration of criminal justice in the country,” – AG Nandlall said.
He also stressed the importance and role, of the use the equipment will play in aiding the Police Force in successful prosecution of criminal matters by reducing the sometimes inaccurate and hard to read hand-written statements.
“An important function of the police in terms of preparing for criminal trials is the taking of statements from potential witnesses, and these statements form the evidential basis that will unfold at these preliminary inquiries both at the high court and magistrates court in Guyana.”
“Historically these statements have been hand written and that in itself presents a problem of legibility – they can’t be easily read and then of course with the passage of time they become distorted and the ink sometimes fail sometime in which they are written.”
To this end Minister Nandlall further stated, “We have decided to move from that manual handwritten process to typed and computer generated and stored statements and it is in that initiative that we are partnering with the Guyana Police Force in attempting to provide as much resources as possible to enable the police to stop using the handwritten method of statement taking and to have statements typed, printed on computers and also stored.”
Deputy Commissioner Calvin Brutus in accepting the donation noted the equipment will play a major role in the modernisation process of the Force saying – “This will go a long way in aiding us in that process of modernizing the Guyana Police Force, specifically the Court Superintendent Offices and the enquiries offices wherever these equipment are installed.”
“This donation of computers and printers will aid our ranks to input these information into the computer system and to have statements prepared in the proper format and the required standard, to aid the court in prosecuting and delivering justice to victims and their families and it will also aid the Force in providing a better quality of service to our citizenry,” Deputy Commissioner Brutus said as he acknowledged the challenges faced in the courts regarding handwritten statements and the quality of those statements.
