|
|
POLICE IN GHANA, THE ISSUES, THE
FUTURE
Samuel Dowuona,
Ghanadot
Accra, May 13, Ghanadot - So much has been said about the
good old Ghana Police Service (GPS), most of it
unfortunately negative. But to think that a learned (law)
lecturer at Ghana’s premier university could boldly tell the
eminent police council and hierarchy in the face that they
need to be humble and learn policing skills from illegal
vigilante groups, “landgaurds” and from the private security
agencies was something most interesting.
What’s more, another governance and security expert also
described the police hierachy as “heavy”! The GPS hierarchy
is made up of 34 Director-Generals! He argued that they hold
their heavy positions in futility because they do not have
clear cut assignments commensurate with those heavy
positions; to him and many others like himself, “there is no
police service in Ghana”.
The two bold men, who dared the hierarchy of the GPS and the
Police Council are the soft spoken but punchy Dr. Raymond
Atuguba, a law lecturer at the University of Ghana, Legon
and Co-Chair of the Board of Legal Resources Centre and Dr.
Emmanuel Kwesi Aning, Head, Conflict Prevention Management
and Resolution Department (CPMRD) of the Kofi Annan
International Peacekeeping Training Centre (KAIPTC) in
Accra. Dr. Aning stummers though, but is known for his
cutting edge, unambigous statements on issues of national
interest, especially national security.
Harsh as these statements by those two experts may be, they
clearly indicate that, as it has always been in the past and
still is in Ghana’s Golden Jubilee year, public confidence
in the GPS is nothing to write home about and the people
feel less protected in their communities. That is the kind
of Ghana Police Service at 50 that Ghanaians have to live
with.
As both men suggested during the National Jubilee Lectures
on Policing in Ghana, jointly organized by Nana Oye Lithur’s
Commonwealth Human Right Initiative (CHRI) and the GPS
itself, on one hand the advent of private security agencies
(PSAs), illegal community vigilante groups (CVG) and the
dreaded land guards (LG) clearly indicates that the work of
policing have outgrown the GPS by far looking at the
constant lapses associated with their work today.
On the other hand, the rank and file of the GPS itself seems
to have misplaced priorities as far as what the core of
policing is all about. As both men unequivocally suggested,
policing is first of all about community safety and not
about crime prevention per se; chasing after drug dealers,
interfering with school campus, chieftaincy and political
affairs and responding to calls from politicians and people
in high places to effect the arrest of usually ‘innocent’
citizens.
Dr. Aning asked the police “who is your client?” and
continued “because as a citizen of Ghana I do not feel I am
your client.” If the citizens do not feel that the GPS is
there for their good then indeed there is some credence to
the thinking that GPS does not exist.
In support of Dr. Aning assertion, Dr. Atuguba condemned
what he called the submission of the police to politicians,
foreign security operatives and to big businesses like banks
and what he called their acceding to rich individuals who
support the Service with cars, money and other logistics, at
the expense of the larger public.
In other words the police over concentrate their attention
on the elite minority of society whiles the larger majority
are left at the mercy of criminals, some of whom the police
themselves have been accused and found to assist in their
criminal activities.
Dr. Atuguba argued that crime prevention is a means to an
end and that end is to ensure that community safety - that
individual citizens should feel safe and protected by the
police.
“ But besides working as bribe-taking traffic wardens,
providing security at banks and for politicians, the GPS
seem to concentrate more on the secondary role and forget
about the actual reason for which they perform that role in
the first place,” Dr Atuguba explained.
Both men pointed out that constitutionally, it is the right
of the people to find ways of ensuring their security and if
the GPS has failed to do that then the people are within
their rights to buy security services from any group who
purport to provide it, be they legal institutions like the
PSAs and neighbourhood watchdogs or illegal groups like the
vigilante groups and “landguards”.
Whilst most of the punches were thrown in the direction of
the Police Service, Dr Atuguba pointed out that policing is
not just an institution but a core good governance issue and
therefore the ball is really in the court of government to
ensure effective policing by adequately resourcing them with
equipment, well trained human capacity and best of all
service and community safety oriented personnel.
But there is a history to the current state of the GPS.
According to Atuguba whilst the Police Service is only 50
years, policing in Ghana as an institution is 178 years old.
He stated categorically that the GPS is what it is now
because since 1829 when official policing was instituted in
Ghana, there has not been any radical reforms; radical in
the sense of reforms from the roots.
However in the late 1940s the British Colonialists in the
then Gold Coast reformed the Gold Coast police with an
orientation to harass and intimidate Ghanaian citizens who
dared the colonial regime at the time. Since that reform,
which turned the Gold Coast police into a force (Gold Coast
Police Force) rather than a service, the police in this
country has known no other way of policing than harassing
and intimidating civilians instead of protecting and
assisting them.
The chequered political history of post-Gold Coast Ghana,
characterized by at six military regimes led to a complete
relegation of the GPS to the background and as Dr. Aning put
it, in the mid-1980s, Ghana’s public sector as a whole
underwent institutional reforms to re-orient them and to
improve their delivery capacity and effectiveness, but the
security service, including the Poilce were conspicuously
left out of that restructuring process.
As a result, the GPS, like the Gold Coast Police Force, is
only very popular for acting in response to calls by the
elite in society to put the fear of God in ordinary
citizens! Recent examples of civilian intimidation and
harassment by the GPS are the unfortunate incidences on the
University of Ghana Campuses (the infamous in-out-out-out
policy) where the University administration rampantly
invites the police to frustrate students and the infamous
tear gas shooting incident at Takoradi Polytechnic.
I am told that in less than a year the University of Ghana
administration has used the police uncountable number of
times to settle scores between them (the administration) and
students. No one can forget the May 9th incident at the
Accra (Ohene Gyan) Sport Stadium, where due to the poor
Police crowd management skills at 126 lives were lost.
Obviously the future for the GPS is reforms and according to
the two experts the reform should gear toward community
policing, which they also describe as democratic policing.
But as both lecturers, Aning and Atuguba submitted, the GPS
is the most studied institution in Ghana and more reports
have been written on the GPS than on any other institution
in Ghana and yet there seem to be an internal effort within
the GPS to sabotage any attempts to reform it!
Whilst calls have often gone to government to increase the
numbers of the GPS staff and to provide it with all the
necessary equipment for effective policing, it is also true
that till date government annual budgetary allocation to GPS
remain shrouded in secrecy and since 1992 the GPS has failed
to submit its annual reports to Parliament for scrutiny as
required by the constitution
This makes it difficult for the public and experts to
actually assess what kind of reform the GPS needs.
Available statistics indicate that GPS has only 17,000
officers and men and that means the police civilian ratio in
Ghana is 1: 1,178, which is more than twice the United
Nations requirement of 1:500.
Whilst Aning thinks the GPS needs more staff to make
community or democratic policing work, Atuguba thinks the
numbers should even be cut down to ensure that the police
involved the people in the communities themselves in the
whole process of policing. That is the rationale for
Atuguba’s challenge to the police hierarchy to humble
themselves and learn from the community based security
(policing) groups.
The examples of other jurisdictions like UK and the US,
where the state police are more than adequately resourced to
perform their duties, clearly shows that policing has gone
beyond just a state institution to the involvement of entire
communities. The Sheriff system and even the system where
civilians are trained by the state machinery to provide
policing are working effectively in these places and it
would not be a bad idea to pick a few lessons from them.
The Ghana Police Administration over the last 50 years has
moved from the idea of just being ordered around to fine
trained and educated gentlemen who actually think their way
through. But to the extent that issues of logistics,
training, attitude and adjustment to the changing trends are
problematic and even beyond the budgets submitted each year,
the expectations of the Ghana Police will always fall short.
The truth is that the next 50 years would be more arduous,
complex and demanding than ever before and the early we all,
especially the Executive in government, appreciate what they
do and are resourced and under the grill of authority, the
better it would be for us all to ensure that we are not only
safe, but would not fall prey to them.
Samuel Dowouna, Accra June 13, 2007, Ghanadot
|
