His concern follows the alleged murder of 27-year-old businessman, Albert Donkor, and the subsequent shooting of 19-year-old Victor Owusu in his constituency as a result of disturbances to protest the killing of the former.
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Ghana Police Service is a lawless club that shields illegalities of officers - MP
The Member of Parliament for Nkoranza South has asserted that the Ghana Police Service is a lawless and powerful untouchable club that always shields its lawless members.
IGP Dr. George Akuffo Dampare and Nkoranza South MP Emmanuel Kwadwo Agyekum
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Emmanuel Kwadwo Agyekum claimed on 3FM’s Sunrise show, that some officers of the law enforcement agency join it simply to insulate themselves against the rigors of the law when they commit crimes.
"The police is a club that you join to protect yourself. The members of the club can ride an unlicensed motor bike without a helmet and yet arrest another motor rider with a registered bike but no helmet," the lawmaker claimed, as quoted by 3news.com.
"I want to see one instance in which a police officer has been held responsible for shooting a person to death. I have never seen one. Let’s test the law to see what will happen to the police for shooting to kill an unarmed civilian. Should they go free or is there a law?"
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The MP went further to allege that the police officers shot live bullets into his constituents who were protesting the mysterious killing of Albert Donkor, and then tried to retrieve all the bullet casings to conceal the evidence of their unprofessionalism.
"We are dealing with a very powerful unit in Ghana. It is a very powerful club, a club that when you join you will be protected. Very powerful people we are dealing with and in fact I don’t think anybody has won a case against them because they are the only people that can prosecute criminal cases in Ghana".
Meanwhile, a criminologist at Cambridge University, Professor Justice Tankebe, said the time has come for a system to be put in place where police officers account for any killing that they commit.
In his view, without any system of accountability where the po lice's claims against victims of their unprofessional conduct are taken as the whole truth without further scrutiny, the unnecessary killing of civilians will continue.
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"When we have public order situations and we send Police officers there fully armed, we should expect nothing but what we so often see, which is the killing of protestors. As long as we lack the institutional arrangement to hold officers to account, to minimize the use of excessive force, I am afraid there will be many more such situations.
"Do the Police have the legal rights sometimes to use deadly force? We will say, yes, they do have that right. But what happens when they do that? I think what we have in Ghana is that anytime the Police have shot and killed civilians they suspected of being armed robbers we just accept the Police’s narrative that there was an intelligence-led action that resulted in the killing of armed robbers.
"But we cannot have a democracy in which we simply accept the Police’s narrative especially where we have a history of some killings proving to be actually illegal," Professor Tankebe said, as quoted by 3news.com.
The Ghana Police Service has been under the spotlight over the past few days following the killing of Albert Donkor and the subsequent violent protests at Nkoranza South that led to the alleged shooting of civilians, injuring many, and the killing of one person.
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