Peace officer or a warrior?

Peace officer or a warrior?
November 13,2007
By Kofi Akordor
THE Ghana Police Service has a history which cannot be detached from the country’s colonial history. During the colonial era, qualification into the police placed emphasis more on brawn than brain. That was why people below a certain height were deemed not strong enough to dish out hefty slaps to those caught in breach of the law. The phrase, “buga buga” in Hausa, loosely translated,” beat, beat”, became the unofficial name for the men in uniform. Policemen in those days who were giants and who were recruited mostly from the northern parts of the then Gold Coast were always handy to unleash terror on the citizens who threatened the British colonialists.
In short, what we know as the Ghana Police Service today started as a coercive tool of our colonial masters not only to maintain law and order but also to keep the “natives” in line. Fifty years after independence, the police are yet to shed all their colonial garb and mentality and understandably continue to carry the tag “buga buga” from the majority of the population.
The question is, why have the police remained in this state, after several efforts to modernise the service and bring it in tune with current trends, more so when it could be argued that it has some of the best intellectuals among its officer corps today?
Tradition, they say, dies hard and the traditions of terror and coercion, two hallmarks of the colonial police, are still lingering somewhere in the darkness ready to surface when the opportunity offers itself.
After independence, the new political leadership found the police a useful instrument to control dissent. Even though there were major administrative changes to Africanise the service and shift the focus of its personnel, the age-old mentality of “hit and hit” remained and rioters and demonstrators always faced the brunt of the police during periods of civil disobedience.
The Acheampong regime gave a further boost to this culture of force and violence when the Ghana Police Service was renamed the Ghana Police Force and had in its arsenal powerful weapons, including armoured vehicles. That was the time the military regime of General Acheampong was confronting agitation from pro-democracy forces which were demanding a return to civilian democratic rule.
After the return to constitutional rule in 1992, all the security agencies, including the police and the military, have been remodelled to keep pace with the country’s new democratic culture. The military, for instance, has kept out of public view for several years now and the personnel are gradually getting acclimatised to their traditional role as guardians of the territorial integrity of the sovereign state of Ghana, instead of the political rulers that they had been for several years in the days of military dictatorship.
This has left the police to maintain internal security. Unfortunately, the police have not been able to differentiate clearly what constitutes national interest, public interest and government interest. People on peaceful demonstrations continue to suffer atrocities at the hands of the police in the name of maintaining law and order. The Kumepreko and Wahala demonstrations of 1995 and 2006, respectively, during which lives were lost and bones broken, are clear examples of the misuse of the police to handle purely civilian and non-violent events.
While it is easy to explain why the police pander to the political authorities of the day for obvious reasons, the same cannot be said of atrocities meted out to suspects. Until the day the appointment of the top hierarchy of the police will be done by a body other than the Executive, we should expect, for now, that police neutrality in certain matters will be a mirage.
However, one area where the police must take a critical look at is the manner the personnel carry out their lawful duties and handle suspects. In recent times, there have been several reported cases of suspects dying in police custody, while others come out with bruises and broken bones. These were obviously due to the bad treatment given to those suspects while they were in the custody of the police. We know some suspects can be stubborn and aggressive, but the policemen and women, being professionals, should have a better way handling such suspects without causing harm or death.
There are many of such cases and two of the most recent were that of George Atua, the driver who was arrested for traffic offence and who died at the Suhum Hospital a day after his arrest, and 32-year-old Israel Kobla Amenume, one of the suspects in the Anloga violent clash who died while in the custody of the Ho Police.
Another phenomenon is the use of firearms. The police should be the first to know that the result of any gun fired is death and, therefore, before they pull the trigger, all the options available will be weighed. Strangely, warning shots which are directed upwards always end up penetrating the bowels of people or passing through the shoulders of those who may be described as fortunate.
Take the case of those four innocent people who were killed by a police patrol team at Dansoman in April last year after they had been mistaken for armed robbers.
The Anloga incident of Thursday, November 1, 2007 is another case of the police going to the place not to maintain peace but to do battle. So they went with live ammunition and were ready to shoot to kill.
We know the police are operating under several constraints, be they psychological, logistical, financial, physical and material. Some of us know that under the circumstances, they are doing very well and must be commended.
However, we cannot run away from the lack of internal indiscipline among some of the personnel and the manner some of them are ready to lend themselves to what are purely private affairs.
The police will thrive not only on the support and co-operation of the public but, more important, on the confidence reposed in them. This will only come about when service personnel are seen as peace officers and not vandals who can go on the rampage and destroy lives and property through negligence and recklessness. That was why Jimmy Cliff, one of world’s best reggae singers, once asked in one of his songs, “Peace officer, are you a warrior?” in apparent reference to the atrocities police officers could unleash on innocent citizens.
To that question, we would want to respond that we prefer our police officers being peace officers to warriors.