Director General of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) of the Ghana Police Service, DCOP Ken Yeboah, has revealed that henceforth, two police officers will be providing escort for a bullion van instead of one officer.
This is one of the measures adopted to deal with the attacks on bullion vans by armed robbers in the country, he said.
A police officer who was escorting a bullion van was recently killed in a robbery attack in Jamestwon.
Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday June 30, DCOP Ken Yeboah said measures have been taken to protect the officers from such attacks.
He also disclosed that banks are working to meet the requirement to phase out all substandard bullion vans.
“We have beefed up security, this time not one person will be in a bullion van, so something is being done by the banks. The deadline they will not be able to meet it but something is being done,” he said.
The Interior Minister Mr. Ambrose Dery has revealed that government has only five thousand bulletproof vests for over 40,000 police officers.
Explaining the steps taken by the government to resource the police to fight crimes in the country while commenting on the Jamestown incident, Mr. Dery told TV3’s Dzifa Bampoh in an exclusive interview that “What we call bullion vehicles in Ghana are just ordinary vehicles with plates on them which are not armored.
“They don’t give the police and the cash any protection and so it is easy for bullets to go through them so they are not bullion vans,” he said.
“We have taken steps to protect our police men and women when they go on such operations. We provided a number of bulletproof vests and helmets.
“The first consignment that came in, about 5000 of them came in just before we experienced the deaths of a number of policemen in these past few years.
“The police officers were encouraged because we then issued those vests for them and also made provision for them to carry side weapons to protect themselves.
“5000 is not adequate, we are dealing with over 40,000 police officers and for those who have interest such as banks and financial institutions, we do not think that the limited resources that we have for the protection of the general public should be allocated to that special needs. So we expect that in those cases they should make a contribution to protecting the Police that we allocate to them.
“The banks don’t get held responsible when we lose policemen, the government does, I do. And I don’t think that the Bank of Ghana fixing 2023 is acceptable, it is not. So is it a deaths sentence for those police we are going to assign?”
