We must stop police killings

We must stop police killings
By The Post
Mon 07 Mar. 2011, 04:00 CAT [37 Reads, 0 Comment(s)]

The two youths in Mazabuka did not deserve to die from police bullets. Similarly, the two young people who died in Mongu the other month did not deserve to die from police gunshots.

But it seems something is seriously wrong with our police and its general orientation. It is said that it’s better for a hundred criminals to go scot-free than for one innocent person to be killed.

For this reason, it was shocking to hear George Kunda attempt to justify police killings in Mongu.

And it was even more sad to hear the Human Rights Commission chairperson Pixie Yangailo attacking the victims of police brutality in Mongu and defending the criminal and barbaric acts of the killers in uniform.

We wondered and questioned what things had come to when those who were supposed to be defending human rights were now defending the criminal acts of the agents of those in power.

Our police service was not established for the purpose of killing citizens.

Our police officers were supposed to be trained in shooting to disable their human targets, not to kill.

They need to be trained or retrained in how to disable and not to kill.

Using arms and live ammunition on unarmed citizens as a method of keeping them in line with the law needs to be properly looked at again by the government.

The use of live ammunition by police is not and cannot be the dominant method of dealing with lawlessness by unarmed citizens.

From all indications, it seems this method is increasingly becoming the only approach to policing to which Zambians are exposed.

The use of live ammunition against unarmed persons cannot be acceptable or justified in any civilised society.

Lawless citizens are human beings whose lives deserve protection and respect; they are not wild animals which deserve to be killed if they run amok.

Police officers are paid to protect life and not to destroy it.

Even an invading foreign army, by all standards of military ethics and rules of engagement, will not fire live ammunition at unarmed Zambians in a war situation.

There is urgent need for us as a nation to put an end to these police killings and all other forms of brutality.

We need to reorient the psyche of our police officers to put an all-time stop to these killings.

Innocent young lives are being cruelly terminated.

The use of lethal methods in checking unarmed lawlessness is totally barbaric and unacceptable in a country that calls itself a Christian nation.

Live ammunition in the context of limited force is applicable in uncontrollable riot situations where the rioting persons are themselves armed and engaged in indiscriminate shooting.

The police should only use live ammunition in encounters with armed robbers and not on unarmed lawless citizens.

This over-dependence on live ammunition is alienating the police from our people because of the unnecessary deaths that accompany it.

And in this way, our police officers are increasingly being seen as being anti-people.

Our police service is not expected to be an anti-people institution that interacts routinely by violence with the people.

This psychology needs a total change. Well-trained police officers should be able to maintain law and order among unarmed people without the use of lethal ammunition.

We need to review and re-design the training programme for our police officers.

The psychology of the colonial anti-people police whereby the people were seen as unruly gangs of anti-government rioters, should by now be confined to the dustbin of colonial history, which ended over 46 years ago.

The duty of our police officers is to stop citizens from committing crimes and arrest them so that they are prosecuted for the crimes they have committed and not thoughtless decimation of the lawless citizen.

Thugs, people with no or low sense of humanity, should not be recruited and trained as police officers.

It does no good for our country and our people for those who are required to prevent and control crime to be no different from the criminals.

We need emotionally stable and psychologically balanced citizens to become police officers.

And only those who continue to be emotionally stable and psychologically balanced should remain in our police service.

Any signs of emotional or psychological imbalance should move the authorities to exclude such officers from our police service.

Those who have acquired emotional instability or psychological disruption should be routinely weeded out of the police service.

The lethal weapons and ammunition given to our police officers are never meant to be turned on unarmed citizens.

Such lethal weapons and ammunition are meant for armed criminals who cannot be easily incapacitated so that they are arrested and prosecuted.

Our police officers should not, and are not, trained to kill. But they are killing, killing our young men and women.

And we must stop them. These killings can’t go on forever.

And the only way to stop them is to stop the political practices that allow them to kill.

The police killed in Mongu, used live bullets and excessive force on unarmed citizens because the political authorities wanted them to behave in that way; they encouraged this criminal behaviour.

And this can be seen in the way Rupiah Banda and his government have been defending and justifying the killings in Mongu.

This can also be seen by the criminal complicity of the Human Rights Commission in justifying the Mongu killings.

There was political interest that allowed those young people to be killed with impunity in Mongu.

Look at the difference in treatment over the police officers who killed young people in Mazabuka.

And because there is no strong political interest in the Mazabuka unrest, police officers who were involved in these deaths are said to be facing disciplinary action or have been arrested to be prosecuted.

And even the Human Rights Commission are coming out strongly to condemn the behaviour of the police in Mazabuka, a thing they had serious difficulties doing in Mongu.

The use of live ammunition in checking minor infractions or unarmed protests is totally barbaric and in violation of human rights.