Resetting Ghana, PACE (1)

Over the years, human rights activists, criminal defence advocates, academics and criminologists have been advocating for legislation to guide the use of police powers in relation to the investigation and prosecution of crimes.

It is, therefore, opportune to situate the clamour for the regulation of police powers in the current climate of “Resetting” Ghana.

This is because we cannot embark on any “resetting” agenda to the exclusion of ensuring that the criminal justice system is human rights compliant.

It is against this backdrop that we call for legislation by Parliament of our own version of PACE.

PACE
PACE is the acronym for Police and Criminal Evidence Act, an act of the Westminster Parliament which essentially instituted a legislative framework to regulate police powers in combating crime (arrests, investigations and prosecutions) in England and Wales.

The legislation was spawned as a result of the report of Lord Scarman into the excesses of policing, especially against black people in the aftermath of the Brixton riots of 1981.

The report deemed that part of the reason for the riots was the (mis)treatment black people received at the hands of the police on a daily basis.

Aim
PACE’s overall aim was to balance the powers of the police in the execution of their duties with the rights and freedoms of the general public.

The call for the legislation of similar provisions in Ghana is, therefore, absolutely in sync with the original aim that reinforced its inception in England.

There is a dearth of research on the operation of the criminal justice system in Ghana overall and policing in particular. However, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that there are structural, operational and institutional deficiencies in policing in Ghana that need to be fixed.

Matters came to a head last year during the Democracy Hub protests against the prevalence of illegal mining (galamsey).

Many of the complaints of the arrested activists are matters that could have been dealt with if we had our own version of PACE.

PACE enabled the Home Secretary, via the Home Office, to progressively issue codes of practice to guide the exercising of police powers. Currently, there are eight codes of practice — Codes A-H — in operation in England.

Code A deals with police powers to stop and search on the streets.

The police are to record the encounter and issue a ‘receipt’ to the person stopped and searched after the encounter.

Code B covers procedures the police have to follow when they search premises and also how any property or item seized during the search is dealt with.

Code C, which is by far the one most urgently needed in Ghana, regulates the detention, questioning and treatment of arrested persons at the police station. Code D deals with the identification of suspected criminals and the duty of the police to keep accurate and reliable criminal records.

Code E governs the tape recording of police questioning (interrogations) at the police station. Code F regulates the visual recording with the sound of police interrogations.

Code G deals with arrests, while Code H is concerned with the duties of the police when detaining terrorist suspects.

Powerful
The codes of practice are a powerful resource in the quest to eliminate police excesses and engender a climate of due diligence and adherence to international best practice of policing and its introduction in Ghana would eliminate most brutalities currently existing in the system.

This is because failure to comply with the requirements of the codes could lead to the exclusion of evidence at trial.

The codes of practice provide that in dealing with vulnerable people, the police have to ensure that there is an “appropriate adult” before he/she is questioned in connection with the commission of the alleged crime.

In Christopher James Miller v Director of Public Prosecutions, Mr Miller, who had been convicted of driving whilst under the influence of drugs, was freed on appeal on the grounds that the officer did not have an appropriate adult present when dealing with him, even though they knew he had Asperger’s Syndrome (a form of Autism) and, therefore, fell into the category of vulnerable person.

There have been situations where cases have been thrown out because the police had not complied with the requirements of the codes — for example, failure to identify themselves to occupants of a searched property.

The writer is a lawyer.
E-mail: georgebshaw1@gmail.com.