GEORGETOWN, Guyana — Members of the Guyana Police Force have set up yellow crime tape and cordoned off the area where local minibus driver Tedroy James was shot to death an hour earlier.
The driver was trying to prevent a robbery of one of his passengers when the robber’s accomplice pulled out a gun and shot James in front of his shocked passengers.
Distraught witnesses watch from the sidewalk in front of a small café as investigators examine James’s blood-soaked seat and collect evidence from the surrounding area.
When Vancouver resident Evelyn Neaman arrives at the disturbing crime scene, she is encouraged to see the way investigators are working.
They are wearing latex gloves, videotaping the area and setting up evidence markers.
“All of these guys have done our training,” Neaman tells a visiting Postmedia journalist.
Neaman is the Guyana project manager for the Vancouver-based Justice Education Society, a non-profit organization with a 25-year history of working to strengthen justice systems in Canada and abroad.
In B.C., JES runs popular educational programs about the court system for students of all ages. Internationally, the Vancouver group has built a reputation for working on justice reform projects in some of the world’s most dangerous countries, including El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico.
JES has brought Canadian police to Guyana to improve training standards and introduce new investigative techniques. Judges and prosecutors from Vancouver have also travelled to Georgetown to share their expertise with their Guyanese counterparts. Sixteen B.C. experts have come here in the two and half years since JES’s Guyana project was launched.
A poor, English-speaking country of about 775,000 on the north coast of South America, Guyana has more of a connection to the Caribbean than to its Spanish-speaking neighbours.
It has been plagued by a high rate of violent crime. The murder rate in Guyana ranked third on the continent in a 2013 United Nations report with 20.4 slayings per 100,000 residents, and armed robberies often turn deadly, as in the case of minibus driver Tedroy James. The Government of Canada warns travellers to Guyana to exercise a high degree of caution due to crime.
It is also a conservative country when it comes to drug laws — someone caught with a small amount of marijuana can spend years in custody, awaiting trial alongside hardened criminals involved in organized crime.
JES officials were invited to Guyana in early 2015 “to meet people and explore the viability of this project,” says B.C. Provincial Court Associate Chief Judge Melissa Gillespie.
She has made several trips here to share her knowledge and experience with local magistrates and prosecutors.
“We have tried to do quite a lot of work around quality control and the police investigation and ensuring that matters aren’t coming to court before they are thoroughly investigated. That continues to be a challenge, of course, because there is always the tension between the presumption of innocence and people spending significant periods of time on remand awaiting trial,” says Gillespie, who is also a JES board member.
Former Canadian High Commissioner Pierre Giroux is a big fan of JES and the work it does. When he was a diplomat in El Salvador he saw the Vancouver group aid police and prosecutors trying to deal with the deadly gang problem.
“The results we saw were as good, if not more spectacular in a certain sense, because you’re in a much more difficult environment,” he told Postmedia during a recent interview in Georgetown.
“When I came here and I heard the project was starting, I was so happy because the method that JES has developed is quite unique.”
Gillespie says the strength of JES is that it makes long-term commitments to developing countries to ensure that changes to the justice system are not only implemented, but maintained.
“They keep going back and they build the strength and the confidence and the courage to make change in the people who live in the country,” she says.
The Canadian government funded the first three years of the Guyana project and the US is now providing ongoing resources to JES to continue its work there.
Retired Edmonton Mountie Jon Forsythe has done work for JES since 2012. He delivered a bloodstain-pattern analysis course to police in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras before beginning his work in Guyana.
Here he has developed and delivered a crime scene examination course, plus a guide that can be used by locals to continue the training after he leaves.
When Forsythe first arrived in Georgetown in July 2016, he found health and safety standards for police officers were lacking at crime scenes. They didn’t know how to take proper photos that would be effective in court. They didn’t always wear gloves or cordon off a crime scene. They marked exhibits by carving their initials into them.
There were also issues with “the care and control of the exhibits seized from crime scenes,” Forsythe says.
“And their facility to house exhibits was deplorable. Dilapidated buildings. Rat-infested. Holes in the buildings, which allowed environmental damage to exhibits such as rain, wind, dust.”
JES addressed those issues. Forsythe designed a state-of-the-art storage facility made from two shipping containers. It’s air-conditioned and locked, ensuring crime scene exhibits are properly catalogued and stored.
Mountie sees ‘thirst for knowledge’ among police in Guyana
On a humid summer morning, rain is pelting outside the Guyana Police Force training centre.
Forsythe observes a group of young officers being instructed by more senior GPF police who he has already trained.
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Retired RCMP officer Jon Forsythe, back, watches his students at the Guyana Police Force training centre in Georgetown, Guyana.
A knife is lying in the middle of the floor. A gloved student carefully picks it up and is about to stick an evidence label on the handle.
“No,” Forsythe says. “There could be DNA there.”
The young man apologizes, but Forsythe tells him not to worry. That’s what the course is for.
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Guyana police officer learns about evidence collection from retired RCMP officer Jon Forsythe, third from left.
Forsythe says he has seen “a thirst for knowledge” in the officers he’s working with. They “really want to improve the system,” he says.
“JES did a terrific job of identifying four trainers, and they have taken hold of any knowledge that has been imparted to them from us and they are carrying on teaching their own with that knowledge, with the mentorship of myself.”
A few days later, retired Vancouver Police Department detective Brett Hallgren is giving a workshop in an air-conditioned room down the hall in the same training facility.
Hallgren, a specialist in forensic video analysis, is going over surveillance video from an attempted bank robbery that resulted in the fatal shooting of one of the robbers. Police recovered four firearms at the scene.
Hallgren is teaching his GPF trainees how to break down the video and interpret the various images within it.
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Retired VPD Det. Brett Hallgren gives surveillance video training in Georgetown, Guyana.
Like Forsythe, he has made several trips to Guyana over the last year.
When Hallgren started working with police here, there was a lot of apprehension about collecting video surveillance evidence, he says. They incorrectly believed “it’s easily altered.”
He assured investigators that it would be extremely unusual for someone to have the motive and the requisite expertise to alter video.
“We are just trying to ease their suspicions, and once I show them some of the examples of some of the things, they have been a lot more receptive to it coming into the courtroom,” Hallgren says.
In Guyana there is public distrust of the police and the court system. Witnesses to crimes often refuse to give statements to police. In fact, at the scene of the minibus driver’s murder, two women who saw the gunman told Postmedia they had no plans to talk to investigators.
Hallgren says video evidence could get cases to trial that might otherwise go unsolved.
“It’s a smoking gun, right. In most cases now there is more video evidence than there is other kind of forensic evidence out there — far more video evidence than any fingerprint evidence, any DNA for that matter.”
“Video doesn’t lie. It can be misinterpreted and that’s part of their job to ensure that they assist the court in the interpretation of what’s going on,” Hallgren says.
“We leave here telling the guys, don’t say anything about the video in the court that you can’t show in the video. Never. It is not a matter of you going in and just giving subjective comments. It is you sitting down and analyzing it in a professional manner, in an unbiased manner, to make sure that the court truly has all the evidence that is in the video from the beginning to the end so they can make a very educated decision on a conviction or an acquittal.”
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Guyana Police Cpl. Carlson Rockcliffe has taken two crime scene courses provided by the Justice Education Society of Vancouver.
There have already been successes.
On June 4, 2016, police were called to the Kaieteur News office after an unexploded grenade was found near the publisher’s car.
Surveillance video captured the suspects’ vehicle and showed the grenade on the ground afterwards.
“It was a dud, thank God,” Hallgren says.
“It was poor video, but the issue with this case was to try to show a few different things in relation to the vehicles, in relation to potential occupants of the vehicles.”
The video evidence was used at the preliminary hearing of three suspects. Earlier this year, they were committed to the High Court to face trial.
Hallgren says there was other evidence in the case, but the video was compelling.
“They still may have been committed with some of the other evidence they had. But I don’t think it would have had the same power as the video because you can see the grenade.”
Gillespie has also trained local magistrates on how video evidence can be used to corroborate or refute other evidence before them.
“The quality of the video doesn’t necessarily have to be fantastic if it is able to corroborate some other evidence you have — for example what clothing people are wearing or significant distinguishing features,” she says.
Gillespie said the JES training challenges the magistrates “to think about things slightly differently, especially in a place where there is not a lot of forensic evidence.”
Guyanese magistrates say training has boosted confidence
Magistrate Rochelle Liverpool has also taken a video evidence course taught by Gillespie.
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Magistrate Rochelle Liverpool on the bench in Leonora, Guyana.
“When I went on the training it was relatively new to me,” she says during an interview in her chambers at the Leonora Magistrate Court in West Demerara. “I love video evidence in the sense that you get the layout, you get the scene and you get proof of the commission of a crime … I have not yet found video evidence that has not been useful in my work.”
Magistrate Crystal Lambert was a relatively new judge when she took a workshop in June 2016 with Gillespie and Crown prosecutor Sandra Cunningham.
“Those three days really shaped who I am right now on the bench as a magistrate. Seriously. I mean it may seem insignificant but to me, it meant a lot and I was very grateful for that,” Lambert says in her office in Vreed-en-Hoop, a small town across the Demerara River west of Georgetown.
“The first training that I had with JES, that really boosted my confidence in the delivery and application of the law.”
Lambert says the training helped her “to be a little bit more efficient. I got through my matters faster. I didn’t have to take so many adjournments afterwards because I had answers — answers for objections were right there off the cuff.”
Even when he’s at home in Edmonton, Forsythe continues his work with the Guyana project. He is awakened once or twice a week by early-morning calls from Sgt. Ameer Ricknauth, a GPF officer who took the retired Mountie’s first course in Guyana in the summer of 2016.
“I would classify him as not only attentive, but also aggressive in wanting to learn,” says Forsythe. “He has personally asked me to bring him books on crime-related processes, which I have done.”
“He has asked me for advice on how to process certain items. He has also phoned for confirmation that what he is doing is correct, the correct method.”
He doesn’t mind that Ricknauth forgets about the two-hour time difference between Edmonton and Georgetown.
“This is why I came down here, to pass on knowledge,” says Forsythe. “And I love seeing the younger generation grab onto what I feel is an evolving science to improve not only themselves, but what they are trying to accomplish for their organization.”
Gillespie says helping a country like Guyana improve its justice system is rewarding on both a personal and professional level.
“It is gratifying to be able to build relationships with other judicial officers in developing countries and to really help them feel like they’re making a difference,” she says.
“I think I develop a lot as a judge by participating in this. It challenges me to think in a way that expands my skill set as well, but also helps them to find, maybe sometimes, the courage to do things differently.”
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Earlier this year, Postmedia reporter Kim Bolan travelled to Guyana for the Justice Education Society to do workshops with Guyanese journalists.
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