Police personnel have been attacked by citizens on several occasions
Ghana as a sovereign state has various security services, tasks with various functions to ensure the smooth running of the country. The various security services work in harmony to ensure peace and stability within the country, although the function of ensuring law and order is a core mandate of the police service.
Security service such as the Armed Forces is to protect the country against any external aggression, the immigration service is to deter illegal entry and rather facilitate lawful entry, the customs service is to generate revenue from import and export and the remaining services like the Ghana fire service and the Prison service also play their respective duties as assigned to them by the state.
Police service as mentioned earlier on are solely in charge when it comes to ensuring internal peace and order and as an institution mandated with legitimate authority to ensure citizens are free in doing their day-to-day activities without being harassed by any third party. The question sought to ask in this article and solicit for answers is if the institution mandated with authority to ensure citizens are protected and move freely are constantly attacked by the same people they sought to protect, then what is the justification that police has the powers to protect?
Police personnel is always on the news for being attacked, either by being harassed, brutalized or killed and this paints a worrisome picture and needs the attention from all meaning Ghanaians to ensure such phenomenon of police constantly attacked comes stopped.
In recent publications carried by the police service to commemorate police heroes, that is police personnel who died during the course of performing their lawful duties. The figures channel out through the reports on police personnel who were being killed or harassed during the course of performing their lawful duties were worrisome and as a country, we must have a second look at these ongoing disturbing events. According to the police reports last year alone as of November 2021, the institution had recorded 11 heroes and some of the victims include James Issaka Aroma, Amos Maaty, Martin Baba, kofi Kechire.
In 2020 the institution recorded 14 fallen Heroes, 8 in 2019, 13 in 2018. With regards to police being harassed just last year two civilians (Evans Addo and Godfred Akrofi) at Kwame Nkrumah Circle, subjected a police officer by name Nii Okay Sampa to severe beatings to the extent of the officer being profusely bleeding it took interventions of the circle police command to bring the alleged perpetrators to book.
The famous incident where some police officers were assaulted by Pastor Owusu Pempah's boys and many alleged assaulted cases on police personnel. The late memory blessing of Constable Emmanuel Osei killed in bullion Van in Jamestown by armed robbers and the robbery attack on bullion van within Accra-Winnaba Road on 17/6/2021, which took the interventions of the Winniba divisional command to safeguard the officer on duty from being killed are a few examples of many horrible attacks cases on police personnel.
In my concluding remarks, as a citizen of Ghana, I am of the view that the situation of police personnel being harassed in the course of performing their lawful duties by some sections of Ghanaian society is very bad and does not argue well when it comes to police ensuring peace and order within the state and I believe police should be given free space to perform their legitimate duty. Politicians, opinion leaders and some sections of the society interfering in police work has not helped the country and the services all these years and this trend must stop so as to give confidence to the police service in the events of discharging their day to day activities.