$160M for Police Intelligence in 2018
DPI, Georgetown, Guyana, Friday, December 15, 2017
The Ministry of Public Security will spend in excess of $160M to expand the Guyana Police Force’s intelligence capacity in 2018.
Minister of Public Security Khemraj Ramjattan told the Committee of Supply of the National Assembly, on Thursday, that the expenditure is in keeping with the government’s drive to create a safer society.
“The intelligence capacity of the organisation is important and vital to it and the force has sought to have some re-engineering done in relation to the intelligence capacity. The undertaking has received a boost from the Jamaica Constabulary Force and this is what the expenditure going towards,” Minister Ramjattan said when questioned by the Opposition Member of Parliament (MP), Anil Nandlall.
Minister of Public Security, Khemraj Ramjattan, defending his ministry’s budget allocation in the National Assembly
Further, Minister Ramjattan said while the sum caters to pay informants there is also provisions for expanding the network of informants and protect intelligence gathered.
“If someone steals something and an informer is going to indicate who stole, there are times when you have to pay up the informant and it is for informant funding …. And information protection we have to now have all this information protected and the protection has a cost.”
In addition, the approved amount caters for the expansion of the intelligence network nationally. “We want to spread nationally to the extent that we can always go back and find the information and the informant that could have helped and all of that and that is to make the force a far greater force than it is right now,” Minister Ramjattan said.
While Guyana has credited several of its recent successes in crime fighting to intelligence-driven work it has come under severe criticism for failing to protect the identity of its informants and files of information so gathered.
The budgetted sum was among the more than $18B approved by the committee of supplies of the National Assembly for expenditure in 2018 by the Ministry of Public security. It represents an increase of $10M compared to that of 2017.
By: Kidackie Amsterdam
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