By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
You know it is a bad joke when some key operatives of the Ghana Police Service (GPS) claim that theirs is one of the best-performing police organizations in the world. As it is to be invariably expected, such assertion is often made without reference to any credible benchmarks, or comparative models, whatsoever. And for the most part, no reputable expert in the business of policing, or national security, appears to have found it worthwhile to either publicly concur or challenge such vain and vacuous professional self-glorification.
Still, there is something quite grievous to be said about the men and women who run the affairs of the GPS, when the youths of a town can easily take over that town's policing and order all police personnel, including the Regional Police Commander, to stay without the town's limits, on grounds of the alleged killing of a 28-year-old mechanic by some cops assigned to the town, as reportedly occurred in the Brong-Ahafo township of Odumase recently (See "Ken Attafuah Pushes for Independent Police Complaints Commission" JoyOnline.com/Ghanaweb.com 10/18/13).
Some of the alleged incidents of police brutality and/or killings, we are told, have been retaliatory. In other words, some police personnel have gone on revenge killings of civilians purported to be guilty of having used deadly force against some of their colleagues. The circumstances under which these police officers have been violently engaged by apparently armed civilians are often not systematically and meticulously detailed by the media, and so it is very difficult to assess these, admittedly, disturbing incidents and draw the most obviously logical conclusions aimed at finding effective and lasting solutions to these problems.
What may legitimately be promptly observed, however, is that unless these professionally trained and taxpayer-supported police officers can forensically sustainably testify to have had their lives directly and immediately threatened by some of the very people that they were hired and trained to protect, there is absolutely no justification for such wanton and criminal application of violence. Not even retaliatoty or revenge killing. That kind of behavior ineluctably belongs in pre-modern and/or uncivilized societies. And I like to take pride in the fact of Ghana being smack-dab located among the respectable and enviable ranks of civilized societies.
You see, police personnel cannot simply go out on vengeful killing sprees on the pretext of collective self-defense. Rather, short of returning fire under direct attack, or in self-defense, their first duty, both morally and professionally, is to promptly arrest citizens engaged in life-threatening activities, as well as other forms of anti-social behavior, and then getting them promptly prosecuted before legitimately constituted courts of law and removed from civilized society, by having these social misfits sentenced to criminally commensurate prison terms.
In sum, it is morally and professionally defeatist for police officers to crudely resort to Social Darwinism or the primitive law of the jungle. That is not the kind of Fourth-Republican Ghana that most of our patriots bargained for with their very lives.
At any rate, I write in staunch support of the Director of the William Ofori-Atta Institute (WOAI), at Dr. Otabil's Central University, for an Independent Civilian Compalints Board to be established for the close monitoring of policing activities. Such a board must be accorded subpoena powers, as well as prosecutorial powers, if the current spate of violent police conduct is not to degenerate into a serious civil strife. The head of such a board ought to preferably be a retired justice of either the Appeals Court, Fast-Track High Court or the Supreme Court, with other board members drawn from a cross-section of Ghanaian society, including educators, traders, farmers, healthcare workers, clerks, laborers and the religious community.
Here in New York City, we have a Civilian Complaints Review Board attached to the New York City Police Department (NYPD). And I have absolutely no doubt in my mind, whatsoever, that the widely touted enviable professionalism of the overwhelming majority of the NYPD personnel has quite a lot to do with the existence of this fairly viable monitoring mechanism for policing activities.
Ultimately, though, it is the acute vigilance of the citizenry, and the latter's determination not to be savaged, bullied, harassed and persecuted by the very uniformed men and women whose upkeep it underwrites, that is apt to guarantee the desired conduct on the part of the members of the Ghana Police Service.
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Oct. 18, 2013
E-mail: [email protected]
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