A security analyst, Adib Saani has chastised the police for the way it manhandled some law students who embarked on a demonstration in Accra on Monday.
The students had taken to the streets to protest the mass failure recorded in past years in the Ghana School of Law’s entrance examination.
The students, through the demonstration were demanding total reforms in the country’s legal education system including opening up the law school for more people to gain access.
But the somewhat peaceful demonstration turned chaotic when the police interrupted the students’ action on the basis that the protest was illegal.
The issue turned confrontational, a situation which led to the police dispersing the protestors with water dispensed from cannon trucks.
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The police also fired rubber bullets which got a number of the protestors injured and proceeded to arrest 13 of them.
But responding to the issue, Mr Saani said the police threw professionalism to the dogs, stressing that their action was a “wanton display of needless and unnecessary force.”
According to him, the police failed to follow the basic principles of crowd control and acted in a way they deemed right in their own eyes.
“In dealing with crowd, there are always certain rules to follow. Prominent among it is whether it is proportional with the threat or not and from what happened yesterday I don’t think the spraying of water using the cannon was proportional with the threat it posed to the police. The necessity is something that should also be looked at.
“I don’t think it was necessary doing that because if you look at videos making rounds on social media, you will realise that at a point the protestors were retreating and you have the truck following them and spraying water on them, not only the protestors but even other road users. I think it was completely out of place and someone should answer certain questions,” he averred.
He noted that the police service is already losing public trust and that such actions will rather deepen their woes.
“When you have a police service that is not accountable to the people and rather be accountable to only politicians, you will have more and more Ghanaian losing faith in the service and that is extremely detrimental to even the police themselves,” he stated.
He believes that the police should be made to go through a crowd control training in order to stop similar situations from happening in future.
“The information we are receiving indicates that at a point some officers dared the protestors to cross a certain line and that is absolutely stupid.
“From what I observed yesterday I think the use of force is extremely disproportionate and absolutely needless and I think this should be a wakeup call. The police, including the commanders themselves, should be taken through crowd control training so that these things do not happen again going forward,” he opined.
