The Executive Secretary of the Bureau of Public Safety, Dr Nana Yaw Akwada, has called on the Inspector-General of Police (IGP), to evaluate police operations that involve interfacing with civilians.
According to him, recent trends reveal that each time the police have to deal with civilians, people lose their lives.
Speaking on The Pulse on JoyNews, he said this violates the security service’s mandate of protecting lives and property, hence the need for a review.
“When police operation teams go out, they should not come with dead bodies. That is not done anywhere. When you go out and come with dead bodies it is a time for the body’s leadership, for the operation commanders to bow their heads in shame because they could have done it other ways without getting dead bodies.
“We are not talking about armed robbery incidents where you have to meet armed robbers and face them fire for fire. Even in those cases, we have had the police getting it so badly that they have killed innocent people.
“By all means, police modus operandi must be reviewed in this our democracy, otherwise all of us, you and I risk our lives to go about our daily duties legitimately,” he said on June 12.
His comments follow a police operation at Bortianor in the Greater Accra region on June 8, which led to the death of five persons.
The police in a press release on June 10, justified their actions with the claim that these persons were land guards terrorising residents of the town.
On the back of this, he stressed that although land guards may be a bit difficult to deal with, the police are trained to maintain and manage such situations.
“Are they telling Ghanaians that when they were confronted with this matter and they sat down to plan this operation, confronting them in this manner was the best strategy they could marshal? Respectfully, no”, he said.
“These guys are land guards, they are known in the community and the police intelligence would have led them to know these people and where they live in a single swoop, they could have picked all these guys up individually without a shred of blood dropping,” he insisted.