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The Ghana Police Service has outlined a comprehensive security arrangement to ensure the peaceful conduct of the December 7 elections.
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The arrangement has four layers, namely, the positioning of policemen at polling stations, the presence of patrol teams, the stationing of well-armed policemen in all constituencies and the presence of combat-ready military personnel.
Speaking with the Daily Graphic in Accra yesterday, the Director of Public Affairs of the Ghana Police Service, Superintendent Cephas Arthur, said “the security personnel will have the responsibility of ensuring law and order at the polling stations”.
He was at the Black Star Square in Accra to witness the deployment of 2,000 security personnel from the Ghana Police Service, the Ghana Prisons Service, the Ghana National Fire Service, the Customs Division of the Ghana Revenue Authority and the Ghana Immigration Service to the other nine regions to augment security there during the elections.
The names of security personnel who could not vote in the special voting exercise have been excluded from the deployment list.
Security duties
Supt Arthur said the security officers who would be deployed to the polling stations would not be armed but would have handcuffs and a few items that could be contained in their pockets.
He said their duty was to provide security for voters, electoral officials and electoral materials.
For instance, he said, they would ensure that nobody jumped the queue to ensure order.
He said the security officers would take directives from the presiding officials as to when to take action because some of the offences were not clear-cut cases of criminality.
An example, he said, was that if a person went to a polling station and an issue was raised that he was a juvenile, it was for the electoral officials to make that determination, after which they would call in the police to act.
“But if somebody comes there and starts pushing people around, that is a clear case of criminality and it is for the police to take action without resort to the electoral officials,” he explained.
Supt Arthur said at an arm’s length would be armed men fully geared up and charged to combat violent activities.
“They will be patrolling the various polling stations. Theirs will be to respond to any challenge that overwhelms the men at the polling stations,” he said.
He said beyond that was a third leg of the security arrangement, where more fortified personnel would be positioned at vantage points.
“They will not be mobile but stationed, ready to come in when the patrol men are overwhelmed. They will come in with a more fortified force or scaled up force with better equipment to foil high-level disturbances.
“And when they fail, then we have our colleagues from the military who will come in with very advanced fire power and that is when things are getting out of hand,” Supt Arthur said.
Caution
He cautioned that the police would deal with anybody who planned to disrupt the voting process.
“If there is anybody who has plans to cause commotion, the person better shelf his ideas because he will be met with adequate force that will quell the kind of danger that he is posing,” he cautioned.
He said any person found to have engaged in any election-related crime would be processed for court and dealt with by the law courts.
“It does not pay at all to do anything untoward in these elections that will mar the integrity of the exercise. We shall not countenance that. We shall use all the force at our disposal to ensure that we bring sanity to ensure that our people go about the polls without any let or hindrance,” he added.