Dear Critical Minds,

On 27 August 2026, a twenty-year-old law student climbed onto a Yango motorbike in Ashongman Estates. He was going to play football at the East Legon Astroturf. He never arrived. Ivan Apprey Baidoo, a second-year law student at Central University, died on the Tema Motorway after the bike he was riding on crashed into a concrete barrier. Prosecutors allege that a police officer on duty at the UPSA intersection gave chase after the rider ran a red light, pursued the bike past two more intersections onto the motorway, and kicked it while it was moving. General Corporal Robert Katey Koranteng, 34, has been interdicted, arraigned at the Adabraka District Court, and charged with murder. He has not entered a plea. The family disputes the red-light account and wants the traffic camera footage. Nothing is proven. Everything is contested.

But one fact is not in dispute: a young man left home to play football and came back in a coffin, and the chain of events began with a traffic signal.

A red light is not a death sentence. Somewhere between the intersection and the motorway, enforcement became life.

I have been turning this over for weeks, wondering whether to write. I have had four notable encounters with the Ghana Police Service. None of them ended in tragedy. All of them ended in the same place: a citizen being taught, at the roadside, that the point of the interaction was power, not safety. So I want to ask the question plainly, and I want to ask it as someone who has studied this professionally, not just survived it personally:

Does the Ghana Police Service have an intellectual problem, a moral problem, or an ego problem? And is policing in this country about the safety of the people – or about playing catch?

Four stops, one pattern

I offer these not as grievances but as data. Four unremarkable encounters, of the kind thousands of Ghanaians have every week.

One: the night crossing

Five years ago, driving home at night with a friend and my son, a police vehicle cut dangerously across us metres from my house. I got out, frightened. The officer told me I had made an illegal U-turn on the motorway. We had not been on the motorway at all. I asked how he could drive that way in a residential area where children play, he could have killed someone. His answer has stayed with me ever since:

“The nature of our work makes provision for us killing people in the discharge of our work.”

Read that again. It was said calmly, as though quoting a regulation. That sentence is not one officer’s bad night. It is a doctrine, absorbed somewhere in training or in the culture of the canteen, and it is the same doctrine that put a motorbike into a concrete barrier on the Tema Motorway.

Two: the airport light

Stopped at the Accra International Airport traffic light by a female officer who asked for my licence. My bag was at home. I offered the soft copy, declined. I asked for the 24 hours the law allows me to produce it. Her reply, in that particular tone every Ghanaian knows:

“Oh, you know you’re right.”

I laughed. It is the Ghanaian disease: knowing your rights is treated as a symptom. I was walked over to her colleagues while she announced to anyone listening that I had asked for 24 hours, that I think I know my rights. A senior officer eventually told me to go and bring the licence for inspection. I did.

Three: Pig Farm junction

Yes, I am a hothead. I was going to pick up my son, smiling the cheeky smile of a woman who knows her papers are in order. They were not. I was driving someone else’s car and the insurance had quietly lapsed. Fair enough, my fault. Then the officer announced he was taking me to the station and asked me to unlock my door so he could ride with me. I said no. Firmly.

Four: UPSA roundabout

Same roundabout that features in Ivan’s case. A DV-plated car, everything documented, or so I thought. The officer asked to inspect my licence. I asked, perhaps unwisely, whether physical licence inspection had not been discontinued. He asked if I had heard it on the news. I said yes. I handed it over anyway. He then arrested me for not displaying the DV plate at the rear. Fine. Then came the familiar request: unlock the door so I can sit inside. Again: no. He was furious and called the office to process me for court.

Two offences, two stations, two demands to sit in my car, two refusals — and both times the refusal, not the offence, became the real crime.

Why I will not unlock my door

Let me be very clear, because this is the part that gets me called difficult. I refuse for one reason: safety. Mine and the officer’s. Think about what that request actually asks of both people. An armed stranger asks a lone driver to let him into an enclosed space and then instructs her where to drive. There is no independent witness, no dashcam, no radio log, no third party. If something goes wrong in that car an allegation of assault, of extortion, of theft, of abduction. There is no way for either of us to prove anything. The officer is as exposed as I am. He has placed himself alone with a stranger, inside a moving weapon he does not control, with no supervision and no record.

And Ghanaians have every reason to be careful about who is actually in that uniform. In December 2025, a visiting American, Arianna Naomi Mackey, posted a video alleging she had been taken by masked men she believed were police on snap-check duty, who she said had covered their number plate, wore no name badges, seized phones and extorted around US$400. The CID opened an investigation; the complainant left the country and later stopped cooperating, so the claim remains unresolved. That is precisely the point. The claim could not be resolved because nothing about the encounter was verifiable. No plate. No badge. No record. Ghanaian media carry a steady drip of arrests of people impersonating officers, uniforms, handcuffs, even fake arrests delivered to real police stations. The uniform is not a password.

If your enforcement model collapses the moment a citizen asks “who exactly are you?”, it was never a safety model. It was a compliance model.

There is also the small matter of law. In February 2024, the Attorney-General wrote to the Inspector-General of Police directing officers to stop impounding or prohibiting the use of vehicles over minor road-traffic infractions, after persistent public complaints. If the state itself has had to remind the police not to seize cars for minor offences, we should not pretend that commandeering a citizen’s front seat is settled practice. Police forces elsewhere solve this without drama. The suspect travels in the police vehicle, or the vehicle is driven to the station under escort, or, for most traffic matters, nobody travels anywhere at all, because a notice is issued and a court date follows.

My refusal was never obstruction. It was risk management. I expected the police to know that. I expected them, of all institutions, to be the ones teaching it.

What the evidence says, including my own

I am not arguing from feeling. I co-authored two peer-reviewed studies on community safety in Ghana, both published in Safer Communities in 2022. I can say without hedging that the Ghana Police Service has fallen short of nearly every finding and recommendation in them.

Study one: trust is the engine, not the ornament

We surveyed 474 residents of Kasoa, a community described in national media as a crime hotspot, on community policing experience, public trust in the police, psychological safety and community well-being, and modelled the relationships using structural equation modelling.

• Community policing experience raised public trust, psychological safety and community well-being; every path was positive, every hypothesis was supported.
• Public trust in the police was the single strongest driver of community well-being (β = 0.467), stronger than policing experience itself (β = 0.272) and far stronger than psychological safety alone (β = 0.130).
• Community policing experience had its largest effect on citizens’ psychological safety (β = 0.365), how safe people feel to speak to the police at all.

Our recommendation was blunt: police administrators must protect the identity of citizens who report crime so that speaking up carries no personal cost. Psychological safety, in the research sense, means people can share information without fear of negative consequences. Ask yourself honestly whether the average Ghanaian motorist, having watched what happens to people who ask questions at a roadblock, feels psychologically safe volunteering anything to the police.

You cannot arrest your way to community well-being. The data says trust does the heavy lifting – and trust is the one thing a raised voice at a roadblock destroys instantly.

Study two: cameras only work if the process is fair

The second study surveyed 388 motorists in Accra on police use of surveillance cameras, police legitimacy, procedural justice and community well-being, at a time when the MTTD had deployed some 3,000 intelligent surveillance cameras across the capital and government had announced plans for 10,000 nationwide.

• Perceived police legitimacy had a strong positive effect on community well-being (β = 0.437).
• Procedural justice – citizens’ judgement of how fairly the data is handled and the rules applied, significantly mediated the relationship between camera use and legitimacy, carrying about 17% of the total effect.
• Accra motorists were willing to trade a slice of privacy for safer roads. Willing. But that willingness was conditioned on fairness: on the belief that the footage would be handled transparently and the rules applied to everyone.

We wrote then that the police must publish transparent data on defaulters. Automated enforcement is now law. Regulation 242 of the Road Traffic Regulations, 2026 creates graduated fines for camera-detected offences, escalating to possible licence suspension or revocation for repeat violations. The technology is arriving. The legitimacy it depends on is not.

A camera does not create fairness. It only enforces whatever fairness already exists, and where none exists, it simply industrialises the catching.

Put the two studies side by side, and the finding is uncomfortable for the Service: legitimacy and procedural justice are not soft extras bolted onto real policing. They are the mechanism through which policing works at all. Every technology, every reform, every L.I. passes through them or fails.

What good policing looks like elsewhere

A friend of mine lives in a town in the United Kingdom where, she says, you will go weeks without seeing a police officer. The town is safe. That is not an accident of temperament; it is the outcome of a design choice made in 1829, when Robert Peel set out the principles of policing by consent. Two of them should be printed on the wall of every charge office in Ghana: that the police must secure the willing cooperation of the public in voluntary observance of the law, and that the test of efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action dealing with it.

Peel’s seventh principle: the police are the public and the public are the police. In Ghana we have inverted it. The police are the public’s problem, and the public are the police’s quota.

Four practices worth importing, and none of them requires a bigger budget:

Pursuit policy that starts from risk, not pride

New Zealand rebuilt its approach after reviewing scores of chases and finding most began over minor traffic offending, and that fleeing drivers were often young, panicking, and unlicensed rather than dangerous criminals. Its Independent Police Conduct Authority recommended that the decision to pursue be based on known facts rather than speculation about why a driver ran, and that risk to the public from not stopping the driver be the governing question. Authority to abandon a pursuit sits with a communications supervisor, not the adrenaline of the officer in the saddle. New Zealand has argued about this policy for fifteen years and continues to adjust it, which is exactly the point. Ghana has not started the argument.

Rebuilding legitimacy as a deliberate project

Northern Ireland’s Patten reforms after 1999 remain the clearest modern case of a police service rebuilt around human rights, community accountability and a new relationship with a distrustful population. It was slow, expensive and politically painful, and it worked, because the state accepted that legitimacy had to be constructed rather than asserted.

Presence without pressure

Japan’s koban – small neighbourhood police posts where officers give directions, take lost property, and know the residents – produces exactly what our first study measured: routine, low-stakes contact that builds trust before anything goes wrong. Contrast that with an encounter model in which the only time a Ghanaian meets an officer is when something is about to be taken from them.

Let the machines do the catching

The international evidence on cameras, including the meta-analytic work our own study builds on, is that they deter and support prosecution best when the public accepts their use as legitimate. Camera enforcement has one underrated virtue for Ghana specifically: it does not argue, does not demand your front seat, does not ask whether you heard it on the news, and cannot be settled with an envelope. It also removes the officer from the roadside confrontation that keeps killing people.

A law without education is just a trap

Ghana has, on paper, done something impressive. The Road Traffic (Amendment) Act, 2025 (Act 1153) and the Road Traffic Regulations, 2026 (L.I. 2519), 247 regulations replacing the 2012 framework, bring the country substantially in line with WHO road safety recommendations on child restraints, drink-driving and helmet standards. The WHO has said so publicly. It matters, because Ghana’s road death rate of roughly 26 per 100,000 people is far above the African regional average of 19 and the global average of 15, and road deaths rose by about 65% between 2016 and 2021 to nearly 3,000 a year.

But a law is only as credible as the road it governs, and here the Act inherits a problem it did not create. The National Road Safety Authority’s own inspections have found non-functional traffic signals concentrated in Greater Accra, Ashanti, Central and Western regions, and stretches of the capital’s arterial roads, the Tema Motorway among them, have gone dark for months at a time as streetlight cables and solar inverters are stripped by cable thieves faster than assemblies can replace them. Road markings fare no better: contracts for new highways routinely omit them, and Parliament has heard MPs describe having to personally fund street-light poles for their own constituencies. The Ghana Statistical Service links nearly 40% of road fatalities to pedestrian knockdowns, with poor lighting a recurring factor, and MTTD figures suggest roughly three in ten crashes happen at night or at dawn, precisely when signage, markings and signals matter most and are least likely to be working.

You cannot fine a driver into compliance with a stop sign that isn’t there, a lane that was never painted, or a junction that has been dark since the light bulb failed.

This is not an argument against the new Act, it is an argument against enforcing it as though the environment were neutral. A pursuit, a snap check, a camera fine all assume the driver could see the rule they broke. Where the state has not painted the line, lit the junction or fixed the signal, the burden of that failure should not fall entirely on the motorist, and it should never fall on the motorcyclist being chased through it. Any rollout plan for L.I. 2519 needs a parallel, funded programme to restore signals and lighting on the highest-risk corridors. The NRSA already knows where they are before enforcement intensifies on those same corridors.

The Ministry of Transport, NRSA, DVLA and MTTD are running a national dissemination exercise on the new rules. Good. But here is what reaches the ordinary motorist: a fourteen-page schedule of offences, fines and jail terms, circulating on WhatsApp and Facebook, forwarded by fellow citizens with a threat as a footnote, almost always in English. Not one officer has explained anything to me at a roadside. Not once. And a law explained only in English, to a country where English is not most people’s first language, is not really disseminated at all. It is published and hoped for. Twi, Ga, Ewe, Dagbani, Hausa and the country’s other major languages need their own radio spots, market-day town halls and roadside leaflets, delivered by people trained to explain, not just enforce.

When the state’s only conversation with the citizen is a penalty schedule, do not be surprised when the citizen’s only response is evasion.

I hold a PhD in Education (quality assurance and e-learning in higher education). This is a pattern I know intimately from institutions. Where quality assurance is experienced as surveillance and sanction, staff do not improve. They conceal, they resist, they refuse ownership, and they comply on the surface while the underlying problem grows. Where it is experienced as development, standards actually rise. Policing is quality assurance for a society. Ghana has built an enforcement regime and called it a safety regime, and then wonders why the numbers do not move.

Eight reforms, in order of urgency

This is the part I want policymakers to take from this piece. None of it is exotic. All of it is affordable.

• A national pursuit policy, published – A written presumption against pursuit for minor traffic offences; pursuit authority and abandonment vested in a control room, not the pursuing officer; an absolute prohibition on physical contact with a moving motorbike; mandatory reporting of every pursuit. Ivan Baidoo’s case should not require a murder trial to establish that a red light does not justify a chase onto a motorway.
• Codify that no officer enters a private vehicle – Where a person must be conveyed, they travel in a police vehicle, or the vehicle is escorted. For routine traffic matters, issue a notice and a court date. This protects officers from false allegations exactly as much as it protects citizens from real ones.
• Raise the intellectual floor – A diploma as minimum entry qualification, with funded in-service pathways for serving officers, our universities can deliver this at scale tomorrow. An officer who understands the law he enforces does not need to shout.
• Retrain the stop itself – Procedural justice is teachable and measurable. Identify yourself, explain the reason for the stop, give the citizen voice, apply the rule neutrally, treat the person with dignity. Script it, train it, assess it, promote it.
• Disseminate the law in the languages people actually speak – Translate L.I. 2519 and its offences schedule into Twi, Ga, Ewe, Dagbani, Hausa and other major languages; run the public-education campaign through local radio and market-day engagement, not only WhatsApp forwards in English; and fix the roads the law assumes exist,  restore streetlights, road markings and traffic signals on the highest-crash corridors before enforcement intensifies on them.
• Treat a citizen’s question as a civic right – Not insolence. Not a provocation. A right. Any officer who escalates because a citizen asked “on what basis?” has failed the core competency of the job.
• Shift routine enforcement to cameras, and publish the data – Automated detection under L.I. 2519, with monthly public reporting of detected offences, fines issued, and revenue collected. Our own research says citizens will accept the cameras if they believe the process is fair. Transparency is how they come to believe it.
• Make accountability visible and protect those who report – Body-worn cameras on traffic duty; a genuinely independent complaints route beyond the Service’s own Professional Standards; and cast-iron anonymity for citizens who report crime or misconduct, so that helping the police never carries a personal cost.

So, which is it?

I have asked three times now whether this is an intellectual problem, a moral problem or an ego problem. Having written it all out, I think the honest answer is that it is a design problem, and the other three grow in the space the design leaves empty. Ghana inherited a police force built to protect trade routes and colonial interests, not to keep Ghanaians safe; scholars of Ghanaian policing have documented how that paramilitary inheritance persists in the modern Service. We never replaced the design. We changed the flag, the uniform, the strategic plan, the acronym. The operating logic – that the citizen is a subject to be managed rather than a partner to be served – survived every reform.

Ego is what that design produces in an under-trained officer. Immorality is what it produces in an unsupervised one. Both are symptoms. The disease is a service that measures itself by what it catches instead of by what it prevents.

Fear is cheap, and trust is expensive. Only one of them lowers the body count.

Ivan Apprey Baidoo was twenty. He was reading law; in a sense, he was training to become one of the people who would one day hold institutions like this to account. His family has had to petition the CID, offer a reward and hire lawyers simply to establish how their son died. The officer charged is entitled to the presumption of innocence and his day in court on 29 September. But the Service does not get a presumption of innocence on the culture that produced the pursuit. That verdict is already in, and we are all sitting on the jury.

So I will keep asking, at the next roundabout, as politely as I can manage: are you here to make me safe, or are you here to catch me?

And I will still say no when you ask me to unlock the door. Not because I do not respect the badge, but because I want both of us to get home.