The Police: My Security, Your Security, Our Security

The primary duties of every Police Service or Force are the protection of life and property, preservation of the peace, and prevention and detection of crime.

Apart from the Ghana Police Service, I have witnessed the policing models of some European countries, but since I am more familiar with the British model I may rather want to dwell more on that.

In recent times the issue of policing and the Ghana Police Service have become the topic for running commentaries by especially our politicians, as usual, most vocal being the two ‘teams’ – New Patriotic Party (NPP) and National Democratic Party (NDC) – with a few feeble voices from the other parties occasionally whistling behind the NPP-NDC chorus singers. These are backed by both real security experts and the media-made ‘security experts’ who only read some analysts’ analysis on other countries from the internet and start moving from radio to radio, TV station to TV station, and some newspapers granting interviews.

With the British policing model, policemen and women (generally referred to as officers irrespective of ranking) exercise their policing powers with the implicit consent of the public, referred to as "policing by consent". In simply terms, what this means is that the legitimacy of policing is defined by a consensus of support of the citizenry. In response to that, police forces in the United Kingdom (UK) operate in transparency where their powers and their limits are known by the average citizen. This, therefore enhances the integrity and accountability of the police in exercising their powers.

What has moved the Ghana Police Service to the top of the national agenda and national discourse? The answer is very simple: My security, your security, and our security, as individuals or as a nation, and the seeming threat to this security.

In recent times, there has been a spate of armed robberies across the country. Many have lost their lives while others have lost properties. What woke up the Police Administration and our politicians from their long slumber was the January 21, 2018, killing of Chief Inspector Ashilevi of the Kwabenya Police Station, by a gang which broke into the cells and released suspected armed robbers in custody.

In Oyibi, a suburb of Accra, in the month of February 2018 alone, 16 robberies occurred during which two people were shot dead by the armed robbers. There are other reported cases throughout the country.

On February 27, 2018, four armed men stormed the Royal Motors Ghana Limited, an automobile company in the Industrial Area of Accra at about 8:00 a.m. firing guns and stole the company's cash. Less than 24 hours after that, at about 11 a.m. on February 28, Ahmed Safiadeen, 54, a cashier of Tema-based Delta Agro Company was gun down and about GH¢200,000 he was said to have withdrawn from a bank to pay workers’ salaries was carried away by the armed robbers.

As usual, immediately after these robberies, our politicians began their political football which they play with any national issue. Perhaps the only thing our politicians especially Members of Parliament never fight over is their salaries and other emoluments. Last week I heard two of them, one NPP and one NDC, crying so loud that their salaries had delayed. When did any MP speak about the delay in the payment of any workers’ salaries?

So, with these robberies, they began their blame game again without addressing the real issues. Since the start of the Fourth Republic, as a nation, we have not done well with tooling the Ghana Police Service. Whereas in other countries police forces/services are updating their machinery and personnel strength and using modern equipment and tactics, our Police Service have endured the lip-service of successive governments.

In the UK, in 1961, the police-citizen ratio was 1:807, whereas in 2017 it was 1:462, even when the country’s population has increased so much. The UN ratio is 1:500. The country’s 2018 population is 66,573,504, an increase of 391,919 over that of 2017.

Ghana’s population as at Sunday, March 4, 2018, according to UN estimates, stood at 29,257,314, and our police workforce is 32,926, thus, police-citizen ratio is around 1:888. This means Ghana needs about 30,000 more police personnel, but assuming each of the governments since 1993 had increased the numbers by between 5,000 and 10,000 we would not be talking about police numbers 25 years later.

Wouldn’t it have been ideal if our politicians kept quite now and allowed us, the citizens to keep lamenting, instead of hypocritically running from one media house to another and organising press conferences and counter-press conference accusing each other and telling us what we already know without admitting that they had failed.

The sad thing about our situation is that, from the time women were being killed under Rawlings to the spontaneous armed robberies under Akufo Addo, the politician had always had a good scapegoat – the Inspector-General of Police (IGP). And as usual, the IGP would have to please the appointing authorities by engaging in some musical chairs game with his commanders, sometimes transferring officers from where they are needed to where they are not needed.

If I should ask IGP David Asante-Apeatu why he reshuffled his commanders last February, I’m not sure he could convince me with any other answer than “orders from above”. Sometimes there had not been any order from anywhere, above or below, but an IGP’s own over-reaction and knee-jerk response to problem he did not create.

In the UK between March and September 2017, there were five major terrorists attacks. On March 22, 2017, Khalid Masood drove a car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge and injured over 50 people, crashed the car in a fence and abandoned it and ran into the New Palace Yard (Parliament House) where he stabbed to death an unarmed police officer before he was shot by an armed police officer.

On May 22, 2017, 22-year-old Salmon Abedi killed 22 people and wounded 59 in a suicide bombing at the Manchester Arena during a concert by US pop singer Ariana Grade. This was followed on June 3, by the killing of eight persons by Youssef Zaghba, Khuram Butt and Rachid Redouane with knives after they had struck several people with their van. They were later shot by police. And only 16 days after, on June 19, Darren Osborne killed one person and wounded 10 others by driving a van into a crowd of worshippers outside Finsbury Park Mosque.

Then on September 15, 2017, there was a bomb attack in the London underground when an improvised explosive device partially exploded during morning rush-hour wounding 30 people. The reason for this is that effective policing depends on effective intelligence, while effective intelligence comes when citizens provide information. It is therefore not possible for even the best police services/forces in the world to be 100 per cent on top of intelligence.

The difference between our Police Service and those of other countries is that, they are properly tooled and also have relative manpower strengths. Whereas the UK police-citizen ratio is 1:462, Ghana’s is 1:888. While UK’s police forces are relatively adequately equipped, our Police Service has no modern equipment. The ratio of AK47 rifles to personnel is nothing to write about, with many of the rifles not in good condition as some have been cannibalised to repair others.

While a police officer in the UK can come to my rescue when an armed person is about to attack me, the Ghanaian police officer would run away (maybe not running away, but going to his car, apologies to Supt. Cephas Arthur). The reason for these two situations is that the officer in the UK moves out with body armour which could protect him from dying if he was shot, whereas the officer in Ghana has no such protective equipment and could be seen to be acting foolishly if he decided to come to my rescue and get shot and killed.

In the robbery cases at Oyibi, the district commander said the Command had no vehicle and not a single assault rifle to face robbers who were armed with powerful weapons and other deadly implements.

In the UK, Chief Constables for the 43 police forces are appointed not by political whims and caprices, but through open advertisements for qualified people to apply, go through a transparent selection processes and appointed on contract with specific terms. Different constabularies have different terms.

In Staffordshire for example, the Chief Constable’s term is five years which “may be extended, by agreement of the person who made the appointment and the person appointed, for a further term of a maximum of three years and for subsequent terms each of a maximum of one year, provided that any extension or subsequent extension which is due to expire more than one year after the expiry of the original fixed term shall require the consent of the Secretary of State”, whereas in North Yorkshire the term is four years.

This system gives Chief Constables the freedom to run their constabularies and perform their duties without any interference from politicians. The opposite is the case in Ghana, where even district chief executives could command police officers to do what the officers know are against their professional standards and ethics. If they refused, we all know the consequences – dawn transfers whether their children are in the middle of the school term or not.

In the Ghana Police Service, though we all know that professionalism is not a magic wand, but rather comes with training, I can say with authority that there is no professional development plan and no institutional mechanism for career development. In mid-Febraury this year, the Director-General of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID), DCOP Maame Yaa Tiwaa Addo Danquah, said only 30 per cent of police investigators were trained.

Realising the need to transform the Police Service, IGP Asante-Apeatu in the last week of February this year, lunched a 10-year plan to completely overhaul the service and bring it to, as he put it, “first class police service”. He has clearly shown leadership, and with the assurances of President Nana Akufo Addo that his government will provide the needed support for the Service, we should have the hope that we would soon see a new police service. Already the government has provided some vehicles and promises to provide more equipment. This is a good step to stop the 25 years of lip-service by successive governments.

However, no one should blame the Ghana Police Service for lack of intelligence. We have the Military Intelligence, the National Security, the BNI and many others who all claim to gather intelligence. Since the core functions of the police are protection of life and property, prevention and detection of crime, apprehension and prosecution of offenders, and maintenance of public order, it must be a cardinal decision for the National Security Minister to ensure that the necessary cooperation exists between all those intelligence-gathering institutions and the police. The CID alone cannot do the job, and it doesn’t happen any where in the world. There must be shared intelligence since the goal is the protection of citizens and property.

Another important missing link in the work of the police is the cooperation of the citizenry. Elsewhere people volunteer information because they are watchful of events around them. In Ghana, people don’t care about what goes on around them or who passes by them and what they are saying or doing.

We are sometimes afraid to give information to the police because evidence shows that some of their personnel had in the past given out the identities of informants. And the practice where the BNI and other National Security operatives sit on platforms at functions with DCEs, ministers and others proudly identifying themselves and their positions does not help with intelligence-gathering.

As a layman who is not an expect on security, my elementary understanding of the police is that, they are my security, your security and our security as a people. We must therefore stop scapegoating our police authorities when isolated incidents happen, where we know that even in countries with sophisticated equipment and adequate personnel once a while, robbers rob, terrorists attack, and intelligence fail.

But my final point is that, let’s change the format of appointing police chiefs. Let us take the appointing powers from the President or Government to an independent council or institution as it happens in other countries. This will give the IGP a tenure of office where he would not be looking at his shoulders when they take decisions. – Writer’s email: [email protected]

* The writer is a media and communication consultant and political scientist