Police spray students with pepper spray
Train your officers on crowd control, Kennedy Agyapong to IGP
IGP visits Islamic SHS students
Chairman of the Defense and Interior Committee of Parliament, Kennedy Agyapong, has said inasmuch as students of Islamic Senior High School exceeded their boundaries with the demonstration, the police, on the other hand, overreacted.
According to him, the police deployed to the scene treated these students like armed robbers.
Kennedy Agyapong, therefore, entreated the Inspector General of Police, Dr George Akuffo Dampare, to train officers on crowd control.
This, he opined, will help the police to be more patient when dealing with people within the age range (s) of these students.
Speaking to journalists when the Assin Central MP led a team to visit the Islamic Senior High School in Kumasi on Friday, June 17, he said, “The students whether they are right or not, they exceeded their boundaries and overreacted. Same applies to the Police officers too, I think they also treated them like armed robbers, it was too much, they also exceeded their boundaries.”
“We take a cue from what has happened to these students so that next time when police are going out there, their team called crowd control, they should know the ages of the people that they are going to deal with,” he stated.
“If you see the students that were injured, the police officers, no matter the reasons went too far. A girl that I sympathize with is a girl who can’t breathe properly because they hit her head with a gun, that was too much for a girl, not even a boy and for that matter not a man or woman. So I will not be here to condemn anybody but I will plead with the Police High Command that next time they should take the crowd control unit to training and let them exercise patience,” Kennedy Agyapong added.
At least 25 students of Islamic Senior High School at Abrepo in the Ashanti Region were reported to have passed out after police sprayed them with pepper spray and shot live bullets during a demonstration over frequent knockdowns in front of the school.
The students, in the course of the demonstration, blocked the road in front of their school, denying motorists the opportunity of using that road.
This resulted in the police being invited to clear the roadblock and break up the protest.
The incident left many of the students unconscious and they had to be rushed to the hospital by officers of the National Ambulance Service.
The Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Dr George Akuffo Dampare, subsequently visited the school to get first-hand details of the incident as investigations commenced.