The police need us – whether they know it or not! – part 2

IN my first article on the above subject, I made it clear that the Ghana Police Service needs the support of the populace as a whole if it is to succeed in its professional task of both detecting and also deterring crime in the country.

I made the point that the work of the police would be made easier if the Service made efforts to gain the respect of the populace and that it would not gain this respect and the support it creates if the Service continues to ignore concerns expressed about how it goes about its business, by opinion leaders in the country.

To buttress the fact that the Service routinely treats with contemptuous silence, enquiries made about specific cases that have attracted public notice, I cited as an example, the numerous articles I have personally written about the murder, eight years ago, of Madam Ama Hemaa, a 72-year-old woman who entered the wrong house and slept on the wrong bed in the wrong room at Tema, believing that she had arrived at the home of her son, whom she had travelled many miles by lorry, to visit.

Why has this old woman's fate become an “issue” with one? It's because it arouses all the humanitarian instincts in one. First, she was obviously sick, with symptoms that suggest dementia. Second, her murder was clearly an instance of public lynching, with a so-called “evangelist” as ring-leader, who apparently diagnosed her as a witch.

Apart from the fact that these are serious examples of the police failing in their duty to protect those weak members of our society who need police protection, by punishing those who maltreat them so as to deter other citizens from taking the law into their hands on The basis of suspicions and what have you, it is unacceptable in a democracy that the police and the AG's Department should be allowed to open and close prosecutions at will, that is, without due process. They, like all public officials, must be held to account if they behave in an unusual way and against the public interest.

What I have said above must not occur, if the public is to offer the police the co-operation necessary for it to succeed in its task. How are the public know, for instance, that the police would use any information provided to it by the public, to serve the public good? Is it not well known that some members of the Service are suspected of using information supplied by the public, to extort money from criminals?

Confidence, you see, is the key to unlocking information from the public. After all, no-one is going to lift a finger to help the police if unconcern about public confidence – exhibited routinely by the police – creates, in the meantime, a very cynical attitude from the general public attitude towards the police.

Assuming, however, that the police will change their ways because of the seriousness of the current situation, and that they will now try to do everything in their power to surmount the herculean task that confronts them, I would suggest that: the Ministry of the Interior should make proposals to the Government – if it has not already done so – to modernise the Service. In the UK, for instance, it is now almost impossible to find a policeman appearing in public, whose accoutrements do not include two-way communications.

In the USA too, some police forces are now equipped with helmets that carry mini-cameras on them. The Americans largely use these cameras to deter police officers from molesting the public, it is true. But their use for capturing footage of crime scenes, thereby enabling reinforcing elements from alerted police stations to pre-plan how and where to mount an effective counter-offensive where necessary, is quite obvious.

Police patrols, especially at night, should also be increased, especially at known crime locations. Foolhardy criminals exist, of course, who would think nothing of confronting the police. But a show of strength – regular patrols of several armed men, engaged in mobile surveillance of “tough” neighbourhoods, can yield good dividends.

Above all, the police should keep the public constantly informed. They should not rely solely on the media to report cases of national interest but issue their own bulletins giving an account of how their investigations into notorious cases are progressing. As professionals, they should know what to keep in and what to leave out.

Constant dialogue between the police and the public would also yield good results, in that they would let the public know the type of information that is useful to the police, and the type that just wastes precious police time.

In this connection, the police would do well to find ways of making it more pleasant for members of the public to pay them visits. A friendly atmosphere at police stations will dispel the notion the public entertain that one only goes to a police station in time of trouble. People who go to write statements should also be treated nicely. And the nonsense of telling such people that “there is no paper” on which to write statements, should cease. (I have empirical evidence that such things happen!) They just leave one with a feeling of disgust and a deep questioning of where this society is going if its police service can be deprived of such minor things as stationery!

The top hierarchy of the Ghana Police Force is obviously embarrassed by the spate of armed robberies that have hit Accra and its environs, as well as other urban areas in recent days.

This embarrassment has led to a minor change in command at the top – a change made somewhat comical by the fact that one of the top people reassigned appears to have been personally involved in the arrest of some armed robbers caught with “sophisticated weapons”.

Be that as it may, such a minor reshuffle can't possibly solve the current upsurge in crime in the country. I have a few ideas on what can be done, but I hesitate to lay them out because the Ghana Police Force has turned out, in my experience, to be one of the most callous and unmovable institutions in the country – as far as respect for public opinion is concerned.

Those are grave charges and I need to explain how I came to that opinion. In November 2010, a 72-year-old woman, Madam Amma Hemaa, was set upon and horrifically burned alive at Tema by a sadistic mob, who mistook her “odd” behaviour for witchcraft! I have personally written numerous articles – both in foreign and Ghanaian publications – asking the police to let us know what had happened to the case of the alleged murderers of the old woman. [See, for instance]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/29/ghanaian-woman-burned-death-witch

For the old woman's behaviour before she was killed clearly showed symptoms associated with dementia Alzheimer's disease. So, in refusing to prosecute the case to its logical conclusion, the police had failed in one of their tasks – educating the public on what constitutes a crime. When the public know what a crime is and what is not, they are more likely to be deterred from committing crimes out of sheer ignorance.

So, had the murderers been examined in court; had expert medical evidence been produced to give a technical description of what can happen to people suffering from the two diseases; had a judge fully considered the case and come to a judgement which he would have read in open court; the public would have been given the chance to recognise that odd behaviour in old people can result from a physical – as against what is believed to be a “spiritual” – cause. Just as a headache, stomachache or boil can afflict people and be healed in the physical realm by treatment with medication and not with holy water supplied by a person falsely posing as a “prophet”.

Equally, if the police were a listening organisation, it would have saved itself much of the tremendous embarrassment that it has been causing itself in its handling of galamsey cases. It wants our President and his Cabinet to give it the “tools” so that it can “do the job”. But when it has an opportunity to demonstrate that it can “do the job”, does it not usually sleep on the job?

For example, it's only in the past week that the Chinese woman, Ayesha Huang, was given more serious charges than the immigration offences she had initially been charged with. In fact, in general, galamsey cases have been so poorly prosecuted that some judges and magistrates have been treating the cases with kid gloves, despite the incessant outcry that has emanated from our Government and the majority of Ghanaians, against the wanton manner in which our rivers and water-bodies, as well as our food and cocoa farms, are being destroyed by galamsey operators.

Another example: it was reported a few days ago that a district chief executive and a district assembly had collected 700,000 Ghana Cedis from a group of Chinese galamseyers and released to them, 12 excavators and bulldozers that had been seized from the Chinese miners at a galamsey site. Have the Ghana police interrogated the district chief executive and his assembly members? Where did they get the power to adjudicate over galamsey cases and impose a “penalty” on galamseyers payment of which entitles them to release the excavators to the galamseyers?

Writer, Cameron Duodu

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