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Dear Sir, I am writing this letter to you in order that when you are leaving office, you could leave it behind for your predecessor.

I will also like you to take a copy of this letter with you for all those IGPs who occupied your seat, who helped bring the image of the Police Service to its knees. In this letter, IGP refers to anyone who has ever occupied the position, unless the context otherwise requires.

In the course of last year I became the President of Ghana Media Center for Social and Economic Justice. This is an organization bringing together a network of Journalists and other media practitioners who are concerned about the governance of this country.

I am still, for instance, disgusted at your posture when you led police men and women to brutalize your fellow innocent citizens whose only crime was that they were picketing at the headquarters of the Electoral Commission, and you seemed determined to kill them just to please your prospective appointment.

One media house quoted the scene of brutalities as “not only were the demonstrators horse whipped with police koboko, but they were also tear-gassed, beaten with truncheons, sprayed with hot water, fired at with rubber bullets, slapped, kicked and trampled upon with hard boots, and some women had their breasts fondled by policemen”.

I saw on Television how policemen were maiming armless helpless and fleeing demonstrators, but in the end I heard you congratulating your boys for brutalizing defenseless civilians. In the end you succeeded in getting promoted to the position of IGP. So you have done well, but some of the victims of your torture are still blind, unable to see you go down.

This week I heard Muntaka Mohammed lamenting about the Police’s inaction on the atrocities the NPP supporters were visiting on NDC members in his constituency. He went further to state that he was forming a counter vigilante group to square it up with the NPP supporters, if the Police was failing to take action.

It seems to me, from what Muntaka is saying, that you are protecting the NPP to visit such atrocities, and you are looking on as the NPP supporters vandalize the properties of the state. It appears that you are failing to take action because you are trying to protect your position as an IGP.

Otherwise how do you allow a citizen of Ghana, who is also an MP, to feel that you are refusing to take action against the NPP who are alleged to have been brutalizing the NDC? Has the Ghana Police Service now shifted its allegiance to the NPP? Have you turned a new leaf, from NDC to NPP? Have you stopped throwing stones into the residence of Nana Akufo-Addo?

Some of these things make me miss Akwasi Ampofo Adjei and his Kumapem Royals Band; time changes. Muntaka now a victim? A majority chief whip who also became the minister for Youth and Sports, who was in government when his party was in power, and witnessed the killing of innocent supporters at Agbogbloshie, and eight years on, no one has been prosecuted; Muntaka, now a victim?  

By the way, when are you arresting Naaba, the younger brother of Collins Dauda? Someone who boasted of killing human beings, I saw you play hide and seek on yourself, and decided to fail to prosecute him, and I’m told that now that the scales have turned, you are feverishly looking for him, but the man is gone!

And how do you feel about the Montie 3 scandal? Do you still feel that it was wise for you to have refused to properly arrest and prosecute Ako Gunn, Salifu Maase, and Alistair Nelson for the death and rape threats they issued on our Supreme Court judges?  

Meanwhile you arrested Kennedy Agyapong, and charged him for treason and genocide, for asking Akans to retaliate the brutalities their brothers in Accra were suffering in the hands of Nii Lante Vanderpuije?

Sir John has said Government will sack you and Superintendent Cephas Arthur, your current PRO. Well, I don’t support government subverting state institutions. I however think that Cephas Arthur, in my view, is not fit to occupy his current role in the police service. I am a PR person myself, and I honestly see Cephas Arthur representing the cowardly in the service.

Barely a year ago, Corporal Nicodemus, a Police officer in New Juaben was reported to have resigned to enable him campaign fully for the NPP’s Nana Akufo-Addo. 

This is what I was expecting from Cephas Arthur. He should have resigned to campaign fully for the NDC, in all honesty, and I think he should still take a long look within, and to follow Corporal Nicodemus; there is no need to wear black when you know you are black red white and green.  

You, and those who came before you, allowed politicians to exploit your seeming greed to bring the image of the police service to such a low point, that the service is no longer able to protect its own self. The police service is no longer able to protect anyone.

By the way, where is Patrick Timbilla, the police Commissioner who was indicted in what appears to be the biggest scandal to hit the Ghana police service? Do you have any report on him yet?

Has he now gone on retirement with the spoils of his scam? Do you think if Patrick Timbilla was an opposition civilian, do you think his case would have died quietly this way? Or is it the usual selective justice? A police commissioner who seemed to have thrived on fraud, a police commissioner who should be arresting scammers, now indicted for scamming the very civilians he should have protected; why is he not being prosecuted? Are you afraid that he would blow your cover if you press for his prosecution?

Do you hear the crimes Police Officers are committing? A couple of days ago it was reported that two police men were arrested for protecting and escorting armed robbers, the very robbers they should have arrested. Last year some police personnel were arrested for their involvement in the robbery of a bullion van in Afram Plains.

Why are you arresting these criminal police people? Are they not your own creation? Are you not the same person who allowed protocol list from MPs to be included in the police recruitment process? What were you expecting from the police recruits who came from Patrick Timbilla’s sources?

Who do you think Patrick Timbilla was recruiting, Angels? If a police Commissioner could be that fraudulent, what were you expecting from your junior officers, that they behave like priests?

Late last year I strayed into some unfamiliar conversation with some police officers. I was shocked to learn that there are some police recruits who could not even complete BECE, but are in the service as protocol recruits; no vetting, nothing. I have heard stories of people who entered the Service without filling any form, or going through any screening process. All they needed were to pay the prescribed bribe, or be on a protocol list, that is it, done!  

How do you expect such a police officer to protect me from you? How do you expect such a police person to protect you when your power has ended? How do you expect a police person who you smuggled into the service, who you know has been a known criminal, how do you expect such an illegal police recruit to protect your sister when she is being raped?

You must accept that gradually, your actions and the inactions of your predecessors have now turned the Ghana Police Service into a government political party service. We give our policemen tools, we give them guns for you to supervise the torture of the political opponents of those in power, and when they no longer have victims to torture, they turn their guns on us.

It is reported that police prosecutors ignore sacred evidence in criminal cases, and rather go for very weak ones, in their bid to freeing known criminals, to deprive us of the needed justice. There are several innocent imprisoned persons who are in jail because your prosecutors are taking after you.

They frame up innocent people, they take advantage of their ignorance, wrongly coaching them to criminally implicate themselves in court, preferring manufactured charge sheets, and eventually getting innocent people jailed.

Some children are out of school because you corrupted the institution. Some children are suffering because their parents were wrongly prosecuted and jailed, and you looked on with glee. One day you will no longer be that powerful, that day you will no longer be able to brutalize me, that day you will know that you, too, are a mortal person, that day will come; that day you will not answer, they will answer, but the cry of those innocent children will come to you…