ABSTRACT
The police in Guyana is a coercive state apparatus whose role must be seen within the context of a newly independent, underdeveloped society with its history of slavery and colonialism; its heritage of racial and cultural pluralism; of economic and social backwardness; and of class and color conflicts. The modern police emerged in metropolitan societies as an authoritarian imposition and a solution to the problems of widespread civil disorder, of the war of all against all. Three successive developmental phases of the colonial society emerged through the instrumentation of the colonial state: the phase of plantation slavery society, the plural society phase, and the Creole society phase. The police in the colonial Caribbean was, like the rest of the colonial state system, a transplanted institution. It is a civil variant of the military power of the state.
