Regarding the enormous task on the plate of the Police Administration as scanty, will be pretentious. That pointed out, we shall also not play down the activities of rogue cops in the Service. Let the administration devise fresh means of identifying such officers and disciplining them and where necessary, dismissing them. Their image denting activities do not stop at the doorsteps of the Inspector General only but casts a slur on the government in the minds of persons who hardly understand how the complex machinery of the state works.
Such persons would clearly avoid holding the Police Administration at the head of which is the Inspector General Of Police responsible for the rogue conduct of the bad nuts in uniform but rather point at the government.
Even as we doff our hats for some outstanding senior officers and others in the Other Ranks bracket the rogues are undoing their good performance.
Imagine police officers, junior ranks of course engaged in most likely unauthorised snap checks in the streets stopping a top of the range car in Accra. The motorist surrenders himself for a check and not finding anything incriminating they resort to a flimsy charge of ‘you are carrying too much money in your car’.
For this reason they want to inconvenience him by dragging him to the police station. At the station they would definitely if he is faint-hearted extort money from him.
If they were armed he would have been risking his life for querying their action. We are not questioning the legitimacy of a police officer’s authority to challenge a person when they suspect criminality but this should be done within the law. Blimey! It is not within the powers of a police officer to determine how much a person carries on him while driving in the streets of Accra.
When bad police officers need money they don the uniform and undertake unauthorised operations on the blind side of their superiors. In a country where many have less confidence in their complaints dealt with, such infractions are not reported. That of course is not a fact because when cases are reported to the appropriate quarters with evidence defaulting officers are disciplined and there are evidences to that effect anyway.
The case of a court in Accra granting bail to a suspect in a case only for the police to resort to a trickery to deny it, a wanton contempt, occurred last week, one of many. It is done with such finesse that it is invisible to the uninitiated to the crude ways of bad cops.
The suspect is not let go off the hook of the police and the officers in charge put off their phones. Such a subtle way of denying the bail granted by the court is outrageous.
What we are stressing is that such tricks are contemptuous of the court and we are saddened that police officers, part of the justice administration system, would be involved in it.
A few months ago, some police officers while in a Service vehicle stopped a foreign gold dealer and dispossessed him of a whopping amount of money. The two cops were arrested although Ghanaians are yet to be informed about the outcome of the investigations.
We cannot continue witnessing these infractions especially since they do not make for the good image of both the government and the country as a whole.
We are aware that there are cases of indiscipline on the part of defaulting police officers being dealt with at the Police Headquarters, these notwithstanding, we expect them to do more towards stemming the activities of rogue cops.
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