By Amin Kef Sesay
Several times The Calabash during its anonymous peregrinations across the length and breadth has come across glaring blatant payment of bookings to traffic Police Officers operating their own tollgates.
On Friday morning, at around 10am at Shell by the new Leonco Filling Station, a Traffic Police Officer directed the Poda-Poda vehicle in which one of our reporters was in from Grafton. The reporter saw the apprentice take two five thousand Leones note from the money in his hand and gave the driver who followed the Traffic Police Officer that had stopped him to the nearby Police Station back of the SLRTC bus station.
After a while, the driver came back and told the apprentice that the Traffic Police Officer did not accept the ten thousand Leones. What he asked for was fifty thousand Leones, without which he will charge the driver to court. The fifty thousand Leones was paid.
Disgruntled passengers who obviously have seen this sort of encounter between commercial drivers and traffic police asked what the Drivers’ Union is doing to address this menace, which they the passengers bear the cost of in half way.
The driver said that they have no Union to defend them. The only Union they have is the one that daily collects money from them. He said when Traffic Police Officers demand if they fail to comply they take them to the Station and the arresting officer is not the one who prosecutes in court.
Asked if they do not hire the services of a lawyer to defend them, the driver said they live from hand to mouth to be able to afford such a luxury.
Police corruption is a form of Police Misconduct in which law enforcement officers break their political contract and abuse their power for personal gains. This type of corruption may involve one or a group of officers.
Briefly, while this daily daylight criminal enterprise by the Traffic Police Officers on the streets and their bosses at the stations benefit them it has seriously undermined the credibility of the leadership of the country’s so-called ‘Force for Good’.
It has also seriously dented President Bio and the Anti-Corruption Commission’s avowed fight against corruption big and small.
