BREAKING: Decision taken to send home Deputy Commissioner Paul Williams
TO BE SENT HOME: Deputy Commissioner of Police Paul Williams
The Government of Guyana, has taken a decision to send Deputy Commissioner of Police Paul Williams off the job on administrative leave ‘in the public interest’
The decision which was made today will take immediate effect and Williams will so be so informed officially. Multiple sources in Government have confirmed the move to BIG Smith New Watch.
Williams, who served as Deputy Commander, Commander, Force Training Officer and Crime Chief before assuming his current role as head of Administration within the force, was appointed Deputy Commissioner in August of 2018 by former President David Granger.
It was widely perceived that Williams would have been the pick for Commissioner of Police back in 2018, but the then President picked Leslie James above him and seven other Assistant Commissioners of Police.
Granger had said that his Commissioner of Police should be someone who could not be bribed.
Paul Williams’s hopes of becoming the Top Cop would not have been helped after he went public with a statement after then Government Minister Simona Broomes found herself entangled in a debacle at the New Thriving parking lot at Providence, with a security guard where at the end, video evidence contradicted her account of what transpired.
In that public statement, Williams sought to suggest that people ought to be able to know the importance of persons in society based on the vehicle they are driving, “it could have been a diplomat, drug lord or someone of a higher stature in society,” Williams said in his interview with this publication.
Both his comments and Broomes’s actions received widespread condemnation across the police force and from the general public. A young man who was also fired from his job over the incident was later reinstated by the security company.
Williams has been accused in the past of inappropriate conduct with a number of junior ranks in the force; has been barred from acting as the Commissioner of Police in the absence of Leslie James because of issues surrounding gun licenses, and also a strong-arm approach to matters involving junior and senior officers, among other issues.
Williams would be the fourth out of the five officers who were appointed by Former President Granger in 2018 who were forced to leave the force in not so pleasant circumstances.
Deputy Commissioner and former Crime Chief Lyndon Alves was forced to leave after a birth certificate scandal coupled with accusations that he facilitated criminal elements to flourish in their activities.
Substantive Commissioner of Police Leslie James was forced to take his pre-retirement leave after remaining on the job way past his required time to stay.
Deputy Commissioner of Police Operations Maxine Graham was also sent home after she too remained on the job beyond her required time to stay. She was also hoping to return as head of the Special Constabulary.
Both James and Graham were reportedly kept on the job to oversee a ‘special operation’, according to the then President David Granger.
