Majority of rogue police officers got into the service through protocol enlistment, security analyst Dr Kwesi Aning has said.

Dr Aning’s assertion follows the arrest of Corporal Bismark Ntim and Corporal Francis Opoku Gyau by the Ghana Police Service for being part of a car-snatching syndicate.

The arrest of the two officers comes barely a week after two other officers were arrested in a botched bullion van heist in the Afram Plains in the Eastern Region.

Speaking to Emefa Apawu on Class91.3FM’s 505 news programme on Monday, 22 August, Dr Aning said: “Most of them (bad nuts in the police service) are the protocol ones because they hardly ever go through the rigours of the process of recruitment. And I think they [Police Service] should be bold enough to say: ‘Look, dear politicians and chiefs, don’t bring these guys for us to recruit because over X-number of years, if 70 officers have committed crimes, and 40 of them were protocol people, then they have an empirical basis to engage and to say: ‘No, we won’t recruit these people’. …But this will not go away. It’s going to be there until the service itself is bold enough to tell those who are pushing them to recruit unqualified people through protocol lists that: ‘We won’t do it again because the dignified men and women within the service are being disgraced because of these few bad nuts.’”

“I heard the officer [Accra Regional Police Commander ACP Timothy Yoosa Bonga] speak that: ‘In every house there is a Mensah’. That is no justification. We don’t want Mensahs in the Police Service, precisely because it is a first responder; it is a frontline division …” Dr Aning said.

He said: “As far back as 1986, there was what we call the Tibiru report that spoke about criminality and the professional falsification of documents within the police service itself in which the Tibiru report, in one of its recommendations, actually stated clearly that criminal inspections can be done by the police officers in a manner that they cannot be identified, so, bad nuts within the service is almost an institutional problem.”

Subsequent to the Tibiru report, Dr Aning continued: “The Archer Committee report and the subsequent government white paper raised concerns about these issues. So, the real question is: ‘To what extent is there an institutional capacity and willingness to interrogate these problems, and what is it that leads to these problems?’ Is it the excessive protocol list that they have to accept in which people are not then properly vetted and, therefore, dilute the institutional culture of professionalism, integrity, discipline? So we will hear more of these officers or men who are engaged in criminal enterprises by using the service and their uniform as a platform to threaten people.”