Says Bizlall: “Police brutality is indeed a serious problem. I would attribute the fault to three causes:

1)The procedures to deal with allegations. It is time to review these procedures and even to immediately stop with certain forms of allegations. Most police enquiries on allegations contain some form of brutality. There is most often no material evidence to prove an allegation and the only way out is the use of brutality and even torture;

2) The dire lack of material means to conduct an inquiry independently from interviews. The other day while attending a seminar on fraud, I said that the best inquiry in a case of fraud is the one which does not rely on the interview of the suspect. It has become a current practice to use cruel means to close an inquiry instead of other accessible means; and

3)Pressure on the Police to have the suspect charged by all means. The concept of considering a suspect to be innocent until it is proved otherwise has not entered our culture yet. We must make the difference between the application of law, justice which is the expected fairness in the way people are treated and the judiciary, which is part of the democratic system. A police officer has no status of judge.”

Bizlall's reactions come after News On Sunday asked him to give his impressions  on Attorney General Rama Valayden's comments on police brutality.

He feels “Valayden has erred in the sense that he raised the question in relation to an alleged aggression sustained by Jean Marie Richard and extrapolated to comment on the Rasta bashing” but he is “no fool to make any declaration without assessing its outcome both in the PMSD and in Government.”

On the Police Federation's response to the brutality allegations, Bizlall says: “I do agree with  Sergeant Chedumbrum-Pillay that the Police do NOT exercise any discrimination when applying illegal means to obtain confessions. Brutality is in fact being applied indiscriminately against suspects to obtain confessions and this is the core problem. I would like however to point out that he makes the difference between using a simple physical force and brutality. The latter definition implies a cruel or violent way of dealing with people. We should aim at zero brutality in the police force.

“The initiative of the Sergeant to talk on such an issue, on the one hand, and to criticize the Attorney General to the extent of blaming him implicitly for the death of Kaya and Agathe on the other hand, should be taken quite seriously. Having said what he has said to a weekly, I consider that he has made serious allegations against Valayden. He seems to know quite a lot about what happened in 1999. I would like to know his version.”