A Facebook post on the Police Administration’s social media site described last Wednesday as a black one: on that day two young officers of the law enforcement department lost their lives to armed robbers in Zuarungu near Bolgatanga in the Upper East Region.
It was a black Wednesday not only for the Police but for the whole country. Two young men who enlisted in the Ghana Police Service to serve their country in the law enforcement department have died through the shots of criminals. They have followed the path of others who like them were serving the country when they lost their lives at the hands of criminals.
Their names join the long list of citizens in law enforcement who have died in active duty. We are not happy when the list is altered with the addition of fresh entries because it suggests the falling of more officers.
The law enforcement profession is not an easy one. It calls for sacrifice which our men and women in uniform continue to exhibit.
The officers continue their noble service of protecting lives and property at the risk of their lives so that we can go about our day to day activities and retire to bed in peace.
It is unfortunate that these young officers, G/Const. Emmanuel Akowuah and G/Const. Adam Suley died the way they did. They did not even know that the criminals were nearby let alone engage them in a firefight as it were.
We join the Police Administration and the rest of the country in mourning with the bereaved families.
These pockets of armed robbery or violent crimes appear to have shifted to places outside the nation’s capital where the Police have remained unrelenting in their war against them.
We are sure that the Police Administration will respond appropriately to this dastardly act of bloody criminality so that these remnants of criminals who no longer find Accra operable will be flushed out.
The daredevil spirit of armed robbers and the sophisticated weapons at their disposal is a loud cry to us as citizens to increase our level of cooperation with the Police in terms of providing them with all pieces of credible information that would assist them to track down the hoodlums who have no regards for human life.
With dependable intelligence which can only emanate from reliable public cooperation, criminals will be flushed from our midst.
We encourage the Police to go all out as they have done in Accra and its environs to track down the killers of the two cops.
The proliferation of illicit weapons in the underworld of criminals is the reason violent crime persists.
The Asantehene Otumfuo Osei Tutu II was on point when he charged the Police to stem the proliferation of weapons in the country. For us however, this responsibility is a shared one the public also having a role to play in that direction.
It is gladdening that a bounty of GH¢50,000 has been placed on the head of the killers of the police officers in Zuarungu.
They might have fled the crime locality and hiding elsewhere in the country but this would be short-lived. They can run but cannot hide indefinitely.