A lecturer at the Faculty of Law, University of Ghana, Legon, Dr Raymond Atugubah, has called on the country's security services to change their security strategy and review their training. He said, to a large extent, the aggressive style adopted in combating crime had failed to bring crime down and added that a softer and friendly approach towards criminals and effective intelligence gathering were the essential elements needed in crime combat. He was speaking on the topic, "Peace, security and human rights", at the 6lst Annual New Year School in Accra Wednesday. He said criminals were very easy to deal with and that if the police, for example, approached them and gained their trust, the difficulties encountered in intelligence gathering would be easily dealt with. He said the police, for example, needed to move into the communities and interact with the people, adding that such a move was necessary in information gathering. Citing examples to back his claim, he said the basic training of the police was brutal and was basically aimed at equipping them to use the gun. "For example, at the training school they are taught to shoot at the knee caps of leaders of demonstrations when the demonstrators refuse to disperse. Why should that be the case?" he asked. "The worst form of insecurity is when the person who is supposed to protect you turns against you," he said. Dr Atugubah said the orientation of the security forces in general was to maintain peace and security for foreign investors and not for Ghanaians and added that the basic security aim should be to protect the country for Ghanaians. He said the war against poverty and injustice also needed to be intensified and underlined the fact that the various ethnic wars in the country had poverty as their remote causes. Contributing to the topic in a lecture delivered on his behalf by the Director-General of Operations of the Ghana Police Service, Mr John Kudalor, the Inspector General of Police, Mr Paul Quaye, said crime in some cases was a reaction to the deficiencies of the socio-economic structures. Mr Quaye said unemployment and extreme poverty caused desperation and that peace, security and human rights did not have any meaning to persons who could not afford a single meal a day. "To such persons, even the prisons are comfortable homes. There is a direct relation between unemployment and crime. It is extremely difficult to maintain law and order in poverty stricken communities, since there is survival of the fittest," he said. "The growing unemployment of the teeming youth is, therefore, not only a threat to the maintenance of law and order; it also threatens peace and security of the nation and our bid to sustain democratic governance," he added. Mr Quaye said in spite of the many interventions made to cOJ1lbat crime in the country, policing was still an uphill task because of institutional bottlenecks and inadequacies in the identification system. He said without an accessible database on persons, the police would have to physically restrain and apprehend even motor traffic offenders before they could be processed for prosecution, noting that authentic driver's licences did not carry real value, since the actual identity of the holders could not be verified with any national database. "We are yet to authenticate who the citizens and residents in our country are, and to anchor their identities to relevant documents and data¬bases and property of all kinds. When such a system is in place, it will not be necessary to arrest or detain persons suspected to have committed certain classes of crime," he said. Source: Daily Graphic