Ghana Peace
Ghana Police Service’s tactics of deploying in strength to show presence for deterrence has never worked, for they have always been unable to control crowd action.
Police crowd control deployments often allow the crowd to have contacts with the immediate area (polling station/the ballot box and the Electoral Commission officials) which is out of the norm.
Ghana Police always find themselves mixed in the crowd they are supposed to be controlling which make personnel vulnerable to attacks.
What is needed to be done is effective Physical Security Crowd Management, Control and Dispersal Measures, which can be done by segmenting the polling station areas with barriers to channel the voters into the polling arena.
This is where the strategy of Process Engineering is done, allowing organised entry and exit from the polling station/area. Additionally, there is the need to establish inner and outer perimeters.
The inner perimeter is where the officials and the ballot box are situated but this should be done ensuring the establishment is within a minimum of 30 meter square radius.
Within this area, there should be unarmed personnel with undercover armed personnel (revise the standard operating procedure that says “No Weapon” within the box area, because of changing threat dynamics).
The outside perimeter involves brute cordon personnel with Crowd Management, Control and Dispersal expertise.
Additionally, a Protection Party should be deployed within 80-100m with the responsibility of undertaking Protection Intelligence to observe and detect hightening crowd actions.
Their work includes ensuring no crowd charge on the EC officials, and the ballot boxes, as we have always been seeing each time there is election.
The mantra of thug actions; beating people, snatching ballot boxes and losing lives must come to an end. We cannot continue on this tangent. Ghana Police needs to restrategise and also stop thinking Body Presence (deploying in numbers) is enough security.
OPINION: BY LIEUTENANT COLONEL MARTIN DZIEDZORM DEY – COLUMNIST & SECURITY ARCHITECT
