The recent announcement by the Inspector-General of Police, Christian Tetteh Yohuno, of seven major operational breakthroughs against violent crime deserves special commendation.
The Ghana Police Service, particularly the officers and men involved in these operations, must be applauded for the professionalism, dedication to duty and persistence that produced these results.
The coordinated nature of the operations, involving painstaking intelligence gathering, surveillance and operational action across different parts of the country, demonstrates what focused and intelligence-led policing can achieve.
These successes are especially significant because the operations targeted suspected robbery gangs and persons linked to murder, attacks on bank customers and gold dealers, highway robbery, and illegal firearms trading.
Behind the arrests and weapons recoveries were officers working, sometimes over several weeks, to piece together information, track suspects, and disrupt criminal networks.
Their efforts deserve the appreciation of the public.
But these breakthroughs provide more than encouraging news about arrests and successful police operations.
They also offer an important opportunity to think about crime prevention.
Criminals rarely operate in a vacuum. Before many crimes occur, offenders observe people, places and routines.
They identify opportunities, study vulnerabilities, obtain information, and sometimes test their intended targets. Intelligence-led policing seeks to understand such patterns, connect information, and intervene against criminal networks.
The recent breakthroughs demonstrate the value of that approach. But they also raise a useful question for the rest of us: Can we apply a similar preventive mindset before criminals find the opportunity they are looking for?
Intelligence to prevention
Crime prevention does not mean turning every citizen into a police officer. Neither should people live in fear nor become suspicious of everyone around them. It means becoming more conscious of the conditions that make crime easier to commit.
One useful approach is the well-known Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED). The principle is straightforward: the way we design, use, and manage our physical environment can either increase or reduce opportunities for crime.
Consider a poorly illuminated entrance to a business premises, an overgrown area providing concealment, an uncontrolled rear entrance to a workplace, or a car park where nobody can easily observe who enters and leaves. None of these conditions causes crime. But each may create an opportunity that a suspect can exploit.
CPTED encourages us to improve natural surveillance, access control, territorial responsibility and maintenance. In everyday language: make it easier to see what is happening, harder to enter places unnoticed, clearer guidelines on who is responsible for a space, and remove environmental conditions that provide convenient opportunities for committing a crime.
Environment
This is where the Police breakthroughs become relevant beyond the arrests themselves.
Reports of some of the cases indicate that victims or potential targets included bank customers, gold dealers, MoMo operators and highway users.
These are different activities, but they share one important characteristic: criminals need information and opportunity before they can act.
A bank customer carrying a large amount of cash may be observed and followed.
A business with predictable cash-movement routines may become easier to study.
A poorly controlled workplace entrance may allow strangers to observe activities without attracting attention.
The preventive response is not to blame victims. Responsibility for crime rests with offenders.
The purpose of prevention is different: to deny criminals easy opportunities.
Banks and other businesses can examine visibility around entrances, parking areas and adjoining streets.
Security personnel should look beyond the gate and pay attention to unusual observations or repeated presence around the premises.
Organisations handling cash or valuables should regularly review how predictable their routines have become.
Communities can identify dark spots, abandoned structures, overgrown areas, and poorly observed routes that create concealment. Property owners can improve lighting, visibility and access control.
Residents can become more willing to report genuinely suspicious behaviour instead of assuming that somebody else will do so.
These are small interventions, but collectively they strengthen the environment in which professional policing operates.
The writer is the Executive Director of the MISORNU Safety Centre a public service NGO dedicated to Safety and Security Awareness, education, and training.
He was a former Director-General of Police, Public Affairs.
