By Marvin Cato | HGP Nightly News |
GEORGETOWN, GUYANA — Opposition Member of Parliament and APNU Shadow Minister for Home Affairs, Sherod Duncan, has challenged the executive branch to reconcile a glaring statistical discrepancy regarding national crime rates, pointing to fundamentally conflicting figures published in the government’s 2026 Mid-Year Report versus public declarations made by the Commissioner of Police.
Duncan argued that while the administration frequently touts massive financial investments in surveillance technology, vehicular fleets, and police infrastructure, those capital expenditures are not being met with transparent, reliable, or consistent public data.
The Statistical Discrepancy: 16.9% vs. 33.5%
The core of the opposition’s critique centers on materially different official figures covering substantially overlapping reporting periods:
- The Mid-Year Report Claim: The Ministry of Finance’s recently released 2026 Mid-Year Report states that serious crime in Guyana declined by 16.9 percent during the first half of 2026.
- The Police Commissioner’s Claim: Conversely, on June 25, 2026, Commissioner of Police Clifton Hicken publicly reported a massive 33.5 percent reduction in serious crime.
- Demand for Baselines: Duncan stressed that national security statistics are too critical to public confidence to leave citizens guessing. He demanded that the Ministry of Home Affairs clarify the specific reporting periods, the offense categories utilized, and the absolute base numbers that produced such vastly different calculations.
“Guyana needs modern security institutions, but modernization is more than cameras, vehicles, stations and digital systems, it must also mean reliable data,” Duncan declared.
Record Security Budgets Require Verifiable Results
Addressing the financial scale of the administration’s public safety agenda, the Shadow Minister highlighted that Budget 2026 allocated an unprecedented G$100.3 billion to the security sector. This includes heavy investments in intelligence-led policing, digital infrastructure, and expanded surveillance through the Safe Country Initiative.
However, Duncan argued that reporting to the public must now match that historic investment. Rather than selectively disclosing percentages through ad-hoc press statements, he called on the government to routinely publish actionable data, including police response times, criminal detection and clear-up rates, firearm tracing reports, and measurable outcomes directly linked to the multi-billion-dollar CCTV network.
“The mid year report should therefore become the starting point of a more transparent security accountability framework,” Duncan asserted.
Road Safety: Measuring Outcomes Over Activity
Turning to traffic enforcement, Duncan warned against confusing bureaucratic activity with actual public safety outcomes.
He noted that while the Mid-Year Report highlights the issuance of more than 30,000 automated speeding tickets in the first six months of 2026—and the Police Commissioner previously claimed a 24 percent decline in overall accidents—fatal crashes and serious road trauma remain a chronic crisis.
Recent high-profile incidents involving hit-and-run fatalities, unlicensed drivers, and heavy-duty equipment severely damaging electrical infrastructure prove that enforcement cannot simply be measured by the volume of electronic tickets printed.
The proper test of road safety investments, Duncan argued, is whether traffic deaths and serious injuries are verifiably declining, whether habitual repeat offenders are facing license revocations, and whether state agencies and commercial employers are being held to the same stringent safety standards as ordinary civilian motorists.
Duncan concluded by calling on the subject minister to present the National Assembly with a clear reconciliation of the state’s crime figures, definitively proving what the billions of taxpayers’ dollars have actually delivered in crime reduction and border security.
