Now That We Know (Final) Must We Always Blame The Police?

THE NEW PUBLISHER brings to its loyal readers the second (and possibly the final) part of its Editorial published in the Friday 20/9/19 edition on the DEAD Takoradi girls – Ruth Abakah, Priscilla Blessing Bentum, Ruth Love Quayeson and Priscilla Mantebea Koranchie – and the matters arising.

In the first part, we took a glance at some recent kidnapping instances in the country, the notorious ‘We know where the girls are’ statement by some leading political appointees, and called on the intelligence community to establish the time the girls were killed, if they wanted the Ghanaian people to take them serious.

Today, we conclude on some closely-related issues, especially our take on the ongoing blame-game that characterized the kidnappings.

The paper is concerned that, at a point, the managers of the country’s security appeared so stretched that hey broke under the yoke of external pressure and resorted to ‘lying’.

Apart from giving the false hope that the girls were alive, they also said the kidnappers were the ‘boyfriends’ of the missing girls.

But come to think of it, must we blame the police for lying to us? Didn’t we, as a people, push the police too far? THE NEW PUBLISHER can say that some media practitioners, social critics, politicians, self-styled security experts and leaders of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) contributed in this direction. For several months, they blamed, insulted and lampooned the police for failing to give the affected families and the public ‘regular’ briefs on how far they had gotten to in their investigations.

In fact, some journalists, who should have known better, joined the grieved relatives into making pronouncements and blaming the police for being ‘silent’.

In our opinion, this ‘TELL US SOMETHING AT ALL COST’ posture must have compelled the police to give us ‘the false hope’.

It would be recalled that, the Director-General of the Criminal Investigations Department, COP Maame Tiwaa Addo Danquah, on 14^th August, 2019 disclosed that her announcements in May, 2019 via a press conference, to the effect that the police knew the whereabouts of the girls, was the COLLECTIVE DECISION of the various security agencies, based on the pressure from the public and the affected families for updates on the kidnappings.

“At that time, we decided – and let me make this thing clear – it wasn’t {my decision}. It was a collective effort involving other state law enforcement agencies that had come together to follow up on the leads to find our missing girls”.

According to her, that announcement could have been made by any individual within the security hierarchy, and lamented that it just happened to have been made by her.

While not encouraging security managers to  always to lie to us when they have nothing to say, the paper thinks that, had we been a bit more measured in demands, there wouldn’t have been the need to resort to unconfirmed information, just to assuage us.

As things are now, it is hard for many to accept that the girls are dead, but it is the only official information we have currently, and we think have to hold on to it, until something to the contrary pops up.

Let’s learn something, at least, from our girls.