Police Force to use technology to track vehicles, assess personnel performance

Last Updated on Wednesday, 26 February 2025, 21:30 by Writer

President Irfaan Ali on Wednesday announced that the Guyana Police Force (GPF) would shortly be installing a global positioning system (GPS) mechanism to track the location of police vehicles and investigate reports of lax response to crime scenes.

“We are going to be investing in a system, a system that will ring fence so that our assets cannot go on other rides except operational rides. That’s important because we have to safeguard the assets,” he said. The GPS mapping system, he explained, would be able to determine the location of calls by members of the public but none of the vehicles responded as part of a system to deliver value for money invested in the transportation assets. “We will know where they were, what they were doing, and then you have to hold people accountable as to why did it not respond,” he said.

He also told the 2025 Annual Officers C0nference that technology would be used to assess the performance of members of that civilian law enforcement agency. He said the technology that would be applied would be safe and relevant to ensure greater accountability and traceability. “Now, what technology digitisation allows us to do is evaluate performances, to evaluate weaknesses, evaluate stress, so that we will know who erred or who did not fulfill their duties so traceability is an important part of the technological platform that we’re building in our modern policing system,” he said.

Police Commissioner, Clifton Hicken announced that the force would, indeed, establish an AI unit but he did not elaborate about its intended use.

Dr Ali also announced that the government would be investing in another 320 high-tech video surveillance systems to widen coverage of Guyana in order to improve crime fighting and crime prevention.

The President said over the past year, there has been an overall reduction in serious crime by 12.2%, 25.9% reduction in murders, a 40.9% decline in robberies, a 12% reduction in robberies with violence, and a 19.1% decrease in larceny.