Human beings want to look good but they do not do good things, they will be honest in front of people, but cheat when nobody is looking.

Very few people have internalized their good behavior, so that they obey laws when nobody is looking. Ghana, our beloved country, is afflicted with a deadly disease called crime and no cure has yet been found.

Increasingly, crime has become a growing concern to all citizens. In our cities, urban areas and communities the average citizen lives in daily fear of becoming a crime statistics.

People now live in self-imposed prisons while the criminals run free causing havoc to innocent citizens.

As crime continues to diminish the lives of citizens and interfere with their quality of life and civil liberties, it has become the fashion for government and elected officials and police officers to be making sweeping statements on criminals like “we shall deal ruthlessly with them, “we shall eliminate them”, “we shall chase them out”, etc. as if criminals were specifically created by God and pulled down from heaven upon earth.

When the suspected armed robbers, Ataa Ayi and other wanted criminals were arrested, many were those who thought that the end of the armed robbery menace had come. But what do we experience in our neighborhoods’, highways, university campuses, etc, these days, more aggression from criminals.

All the reactive operational measures adopted by the security agencies over the years have not yielded the desired dividends.

Beyond you and I, ask the question “who caused the crime”. Let us not also gloss over the question: what is the root cause of that crime?” The time has come for us, as a nation, to stop the over-reliance on reactive actions and the kind of superficial type of social analysis that grapples with the effects of problems and leave the underlying or root causes untouched.

The fight against crime is not being won because there is no serious commitment to indentifying and tackling the underlying causes.

Crime reflects the character of people. This is the painful fact we do not want to face. Other premises are easier to accept, other causes are also easier to control.

There is no simple reform for defective character. It is stubborn, durable and strong as ourselves. It is ourselves. The cause of crime is lack of character.

All the qualities in life that make us what we are determine our capacity to commit crime.

Heredity and environment, the interaction of individual and society, the totality of human nature and human experience –these are the elemental origins of crime.

No part by itself will tell us all we need to know to effectively prevent an anti-social conduct. Crime is not just sordid happenings – it is human behavior. People commit crime.

Crime is the victimizing of one’s neighbor. What we should know when crime occurs is that there are individuals who care so little for others, or have such disregard for the systems and standards of society, or who have so little control over themselves that they will hurt people, take property that is not theirs and violate the law. So long as a society includes such individuals, crime will occur.

However, an effective government may make efforts to control crime, while its citizens have the will to violate the law; society is in a contest it can never finally win.

Nor can there be lasting comfort in safety that is dependent on a policeman, for police can never be omnipresent. What happens when they are not there? And who finally protects us from the police? Where crime occurs constantly, we cannot help but view our neighbors with apprehension, however close the precinct to the station.

To look at our fellow citizens through the eyes filled with fear is not to live in a happy place.

Crime reflects more than the character of the pitiful few who commit it. It reflects the character of the entire society. How do people capable of corruption, fraud, embezzlement, robbery, stealing, drug peddling, substance abuse, vandalism, hooliganism, rape, defilement come to be that way?

All they are and all they have experienced that drove them to commit that crime over-came all that sought in vain to restrain them. What they are and what they experienced came largely from society- from its influence on them and on their forebears.

If we are to deal meaningfully with crime, what must be seen is the dehumansing effect on the individual corruption and impotence to fulfill rights.

Others are poverty and unemployment and idleness of generations of malnutrition, of congenial brain damage and prenatal neglects, of sickness and disease, of pollution, of decrepit, dirty, ugly, unsafe, over-crowded housing, of alcoholism and narcotics addiction, of avarice, anxiety, fear, hatred, hopelessness and injustice. These are the fountainheads of crime.

We are cruelly afflicted with crime because we have failed to care for ourselves and for our character. We are guilty of immense neglect.

Neglect, not permissiveness, is the culprit. Do not blame the precious little true freedoms that the individual can squeeze out of mass society for the sins of generations of selfish neglect.

It was from too little love and help, not too much liberty that the child across the street ran with the gang.

We – his family, friends, neighbors, schools, church – all watched him for years, and no one was truly surprised when, just backs from the reformatory again, he was arrested for murdering a store clerk while committing armed robbery.

What can his mother-an alcoholic, unemployed, and husbandless with four children- do for him? What can poor school teacher, barely able to maintain classroom order among forty students, do to help such a youngster? Can we hope to create a just society and assure domestic tranquility by reacting in anger with force? We will assure calm if government acts only to keep poor in their place.

It was another form of neglect indifference, not helplessness – that caused the wealthy urban father to give his teenage son a new car and let him stay out all night.

Such a father has no cause to speak of ingratitude; after all he has done for his son, when the boy is arrested for gang-raping a fifteen year-old girl. He gave his son nothing.

The crucial test of Ghanaian character will be our reaction to the vastness of crime and turbulence in which we live. It will not be easy to test. The obvious and instinctive reaction is repressiveness. It will not work. You cannot discipline this turbulent, independent, young mass society as if it were a child. Repression is the one clear course towards irreconcilable division within society.

The essential action is to create a wholesome environment. Healthy people in a just and concerned society will not commit significant crimes. To fail this test id to destroy liberty for the individual in a mass society.

To pass it is to liberate the powers of the individuals for the good of mankind – to provide even for the most miserable among us the chance to have fulfillment of life, to do all he can to be whatever he has within him to be.

Crime threatens self-preservation and stimulates age-old emotions. The most dangerous of these is fear. Reason fades as fear deprives us of any concern or compassion for others.

When fears turn our concern entirely to self-protection, those who must have out help if crime is to be controlled lose that chance.

Finally, fear can destroy our desire for justice itself. Then there is little hope. We are prepared to deny justice to obtain what unreasoning , overpowering emotions falsely tells us will be security.

Arm yourself, suppress dissent, invade privacy, urge police to trick and deceive, force confession, give long severe jail terms, brutalise in cells and prisons, and execute the criminals.

Due process can wait- we want safety! Naked power becomes  sovereign. Only force can rise to meet it. The end is violence.

Fear was saving reflex for the cave man. His survival depended on it.

There were threats in nature he could not control. Alerted by fear, he could flee or, through cunning, destroy and thereby survival; it imprisons people in their homes and makes the realization of other civil liberties impossible.

Nature holds few perils we cannot control, and our problems are far too vast and complex to let unreasoning fear direct their resolution. Population growth and technology have made the individual so totally dependent upon others that his very safety and welfare depend upon theirs.

Personal preservation can no longer be found in flight or self-defence excepts in the most temporary way. Safety can come only from service to others, because until the basic human needs of all are fulfilled, there will be vast unrest at work that cannot be stilled by force or by admonition to respect the law.

To insist on the dignity of the individual, to assure him health and education, meaningful employment, decent living conditions, to protect his privacy and the integrity of his personality, to enforce his rights though he may be the least among us, to give him power to affect his own destiny- only thus can we hoping to instill in him a concern for others, for their wellbeing, their safety and the security of their property.

Only thus can we bring to him a regard for our society, our institutions and our purpose as a people that will render him incapable of committing crime.

If we are to prevent crime in the midst of increasing anxiety and fear, of complexity and doubt, our greatest need is reverence for life and property.

A humane and generous concern for each individual, for his safety, his health and his fulfillment, will do more to soothe and humanize our savage hearts than any police power that man can devise.

When society seeks vengeance when it cheapens one’s life, it demeans all lives. Violence in a massly interdependent technologically advanced society threatens everyone.

There is no escape. It is no longer tolerable as a problem solver in private or public hand- international or interpersonal affairs. There is little evidence that some new wisdom which could not restrain the club will stop the bomb.

Most Ghanaians are incapable of committing a serious crime- but far too many can. Our Character as people determines this capability.

There have been and now whole societies where but a very few, and they only under extraordinary circumstances, can bring themselves to injure another or take what is not theirs.

But in Ghana we have cultivated crime and hence have reaped a bountiful crop. Crime is the ultimate human degradation. A civilized people have no higher duty than to do everything within their power to seek its reduction and remove the opportunities for crime.