Police Chase "Robbers" In Taxi Cabs....

... As 200 Patrol Vans Are Packed

A lot has been reported about the Dansoman shooting incident in which trigger-happy police officers shot and killed four people last week.

What has not been reported is the fact that the police officers who did the killing were operating in a hired taxi cab.

Security analysts have told Public Agenda that the mere fact that the police officers drove in a taxi cab made it difficult for the victims to obey the police order.

Some eyewitnesses said they suspected that the driver of the Daewoo Tico taxi cab, in which Lydia Opoku, ( Awo) and her buddy, Ataa Boatemaa, were driving in before their untimely death had mistaken the police taxi as a team of armed robbers who were pursuing them, hence their decision to escape to safety.

The police however, angered by the taxi driver's refusal to stop and suspecting them to be armed robbers, decided to 'finish' them off with their AK 47s.

The eyewitnesses say perhaps, due to the fact that the two women had earlier in the morning been victims of robbery, it was natural that they would ignore shouts of 'stop, stop' from an unidentified group, as the police were.

In the view of the eyewitnesses, if the police officers were driving in their official patrol vans, the deceased would have obliged to their orders and stopped.

The legitimate question is, why are the police officers performing their night duties in hired taxi cabs? What has happened to the patrol vans and the Peugeot cars that the government provided the police about two years ago?

The sad news is that most of the cars have broken down. According to police sources, over 200 of the Peugeot cars and the patrol vans have broken down and are currently packed, compelling patrol teams to operate in taxi cabs. For instance, the Dansoman police division, where the officers who did the killing are from does not have a single patrol car.

Public Agenda has learnt that Accra alone needs over 300 road worthy patrol vehicles to effectively perform patrol duties, but currently it has less than 100 vans.

Besides, the cost of maintenance is high for the service. "Buying the cars is one thing. Keeping the cars on the road is a different thing altogether. It is expensive maintaining those vans and we do not have the resources," was the explanation from a police source.

Meanwhile as typical of Ghanaians, the religious, 'prophets,' pseudo men of God and the 'nothing-happens-for-nothing people' are giving various interpretations to the 'Dansoman shooting tragedy.' Though they all agree from their own interpretation of the events that the two women were not armed robbers as initially reported by some media houses and that they died tragically from unmeasured use of force by the police, some are contending that their death "was not-for nothing."

It is their view that the death of Awo and Ataa could be a blessing in disguise. They drew an analogy with how Jesus Christ had died to save mankind from sin and that Awo and Ataa's death was for a similar purpose-"To bring an end to armed robbery in the city of Accra."

This is their belief because, as they told this reporter, that since the Dansoman shooting incident, and until the time of talking to these 'religious' men and women, no armed robbery had occurred in Accra. And this was positively corroborated by some sources at the Accra Central Police.

But others hold a different view. To these 'nothing-happens-for nothing,' group, the two women might have suffered a punishment from God for their own wrongs and not for the safety of humankind. This group holds the view that since the two women were traders, crisscrossing boarders for the purposes of making money, they might have defrauded some people, or cheated the nation in some way and that might have angered God to punish them.