Police Lies and Armed Robbery Truth
I could not stand the frigid and disregarding manner in which the Sierra Leone Police reacted to the growing peril facing life in the country in the guise of armed robbery that’s now the main source of fear to the ordinary man in the country.
Businesses are fast loosing confidence in the security system in the country, armed robbery attacks are planned and executed with grand success with police ending up given excuses for the incidents, down playing the seriousness of the matter and incurring much anger and suspicion from the general public that the police might be involved one way or the other.
Even at the death of one of their own in the hands of armed robbers yesterday, the Sierra Leone Police could still afford to hide the enormity and ever rising scale of armed robbery in the country. It was certainly heart rendering to hear the police in a well attended Press Conference when the Sierra Leone Police pronounced that armed robbery in the country is not as alarming as is reported by the local media.
Thiw type of ostrich approach to our problem highlights two factors; First,  that the police are led to cover up the reality surrounding armed robbery in the country because they don’t seem to have control over the now apparently out of control scenario. Second, that the police are covering their back because they are the ones involved!
In the absence of that, why would the police want to downplay such an issue of enormous public concern, affording to say instead that the whole armed robbery saga is an exaggeration, an amplification of the reality in telling the press that armed robbery incidents are isolated occurrences. I discontinued patronage of the press conference after I came to the conclusion that the police are not serious and certainly took all those present at the confab for granted and capable to gullibly eat from the insane concoctions and doctoring of the truth they told to media practitioners.
I have personally edited more than 10 stories of armed robberies committed in and around the country in the last one month; it sickened me when the Sierra Leone Police could jump over all of those, stories we got from various police stations across the capital-Freetown and the rest of the country and tell us “we have only isolated cases of armed robberies in the country.”
 It was even more sickening, sickening to the gut to realize that the police were making such statement only a few hours after they lost one of their colleagues to gunshot wounds from armed robbers at Leicester Road in Freetown. At lest the blood from the bullet wounds of the dead officer had even not stopped dripping from the raw wounds of the officer and his bosses could not hold back to exonerate his killers, to justify that armed robbery is a less threat to life in Sierra Leone, a lesser than what they gullibly referred to as ‘school gangsters.’
Whatever the front from which the police made their claims, it just doesn’t fall through. There is no way we could be made to understand that school boys could be more of a threat than robbers that are responsible for the current gun nemesis that has gripped the country from all fronts.
Sadly, when you talk to each home that has seen their version of the armed robbery doom, they are always in one way or the other, having reasons to link it to the police. They would either say the armed robbers carry guns belonging to the police or report that they carry police gears and paraphernalia and wear police uniforms or fatigues.
It is therefore not in any way insinuating when the police are directly accused of being culpable in the numerous acts of armed robbery.
But I am equally led to think that always identifying the police with such ill happenings only leaves one grappling for answers as to what really might have gone wrong: police guns, police gears, police PR on robbery incidents-where does the truth lie?
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