They Are Called Police Sketch Artists, Not Cartographers

Finally, police investigators say that they are beginning to make a critical headway in the case involving the shooting death of Mr. Ahmed Hussein-Suale, who is known to have played a major role in the Tiger-Eye PI-produced filmic documentary called “Number 12,” that led to the forced resignation of the President of the Ghana Football Association (GFA) and the summary dissolution of the GFA’s Governing Board last year (See “Police Make Headway in Anas Boy’s Murder” DailyGuideNetWork.com / Ghanaweb.com 2/9/19). So far, officials of the Kumasi, Asante Region, branch of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) of the Ghana Police Service (GPS) say that leads provided by witnesses to Mr. Hussein-Suale’s murder have led to the arrest of at least six criminal suspects who are presently being questioned but are currently on bail.

Now, that is a good start, although for the family members, relatives and friends of the slain man, it will remain a matter of cold comfort until the identities of the real killers have been established beyond the proverbial shadow of reasonable doubt. What remains to further enhance the ability of police investigators to get to the bottom of the case, according to the Director-General of Public Affairs of the GPS, David Senanu Eklu, an Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP), is the avid need for the immediate recruitment or hiring of Police Sketch Artists, which he erroneously dubs as “cartographers” or mapmakers. The role of these sketch artists is to take information and eyewitness descriptions and convert the same into what is called “Identikits” or mugshots of the criminal suspects so as to enable them to be identified by members of the general public.

Now, what the preceding obviously means is that the Criminal Investigations Department of the GPS is woefully underequipped and may need a massive infusion of budgetary resources to upgrade itself to global standards. In the meantime, what this means is that the chief administrators of the CID division of the GPS need to start thinking of establishing a training school for Police Sketch Artists, as well as the training of DNA-savvy investigators. This is what our primary law-enforcement agency ought to have been doing all the while that the Mills-Mahama regime was busy farming out the work of our GPS personnel to such private investigations firms as the Anas Aremeyaw Anas-owned Tiger-Eye PI company, as well as unwisely siphoning the budgetary resources of the GPS to other private investigations firms. It will take quite a considerable while for the Ghana Police Service to be satisfactorily upgraded to the level that it needs to be for a major country like the Democratic Republic of Ghana.

The government may also need to use its membership in such international socioeconomic and cultural organizations and associations as The Commonwealth and, most recently, the Francophone Alliance, to solicit the assistance of countries with much better security systems to help train the relevant personnel of the Ghana Police Service. As the jaded maxim goes: “No individual or country can have more security than s/he/it needs.” Other equally grave murder and assassination cases, such as that of Mr. JB Danquah-Adu, the former New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Akyem-Abuakwa-North and the point-blank shooting death of Mr. Peter Kenyenso, the Mahama-appointed Nkwanta-South Municipal Chief Executive (MCE) ought to be revisited and vigorously pursued to rock-bottom. Then also, maybe the leaders of the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party need to be reminded of the unduly dragging case of Mr. Adams Mahama, the acid-slain former Upper-East’s Regional Chairman of the New Patriotic Party.

I have even thought that it is well-nigh time that a memorial award got established in the name of Mr. Adams Mahama. Too many killings have occurred under Fourth-Republican governments that ought not to have occurred, if our national security apparatus were the level that it needed to be. The government may also need to promptly enforce the existing gun-control laws in the country. And if these laws are not adequate enough to ensure the drastic reduction in the number of handguns and assault weapons in private hands, then they need to be promptly upgraded. One hopes that gun-control measures are included in the terms of reference of the Short Commission that was recently established by President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and charged with investigating the recent violent clashes that partially disrupted the Ayawaso-West Wuogon byelection on January 31^st ,2019.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
February 9, 2019
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net