A Member of Parliament has raised concerns that the Police Service did not use proper discretion in handling the demonstration which happened at the Islamic Senior High School.
Some students of the Islamic Senior High School demonstrated over the absence of speed ramps which had caused accidents and the loss of lives on the road in front of their school. Police went to the scene to disperse the students.
However, about 30 students, during the week, were forced to the hospital after Police fired warning shots and tear gas into the crowd for causing traffic in front of their school.
The Wa West MP, Hon. Peter Toobu, said during an interview on the Big Issue yesterday that: “at any point in time, the police officer who is in charge of operations has a wide space of discretion and he has to use it well”.
The lawmaker was responding to reports that the students attacked the police at the scene with stones and some were holding cutlasses. For him, handling such advances are basic in policing.
“Do you know if you go to the Form Police training ground, there are role players who actually behave like civilians, pelting stones, sticks, and all that in their training. So when you find a police officer on a crowd control duty saying that they were throwing stones and throwing sticks, tell the person that is how you were trained to understand that in a demonstration it can go violent.
“They can throw stones and they can throw sticks, you are trained to be able to withstand that purpose. So it is nothing new and nothing surprising”, Hon. Toobu added.
The former Police officer further added that: “at the time that they informed the police and it was a regional matter and the regional operations went there to support the division, whatever tools that they carried there with, they should have known that this is(are) students demonstrating. So you go there with the mentality that we are going to deal with 15,16, 17, and 18 years old young people”.
Mr. Toobu indicated that ‘even though no person has died, the fear of hearing gunshots and trying to escape the bullets could have ended the lives of some of the children. Therefore, the deployment of such force to the scene was an embarrassment’.
“If you deployed the wrong tools to solve a problem, you get wrong answers. If the police deployed the wrong department or wrong unit to deal with crowd management, all you get is embarrassment”.
In conclusion, the Ranking Member of Parliament on the Defense and Interior Committee added that:
“Haven been a student, haven been a student leader, and haven been a police officer before, I think that the Police could have done better”.
