Are Police disregarding basic human rights?

Summer Little, SOC 202

Ghana is no doubt paying a price for having law enforcers who lack human decency, and apparently the knowledge as to what basic human rights are. Beating a human being to death because of a suspected robbery is in fact, not exactly legal- not just in Ghana, but in other countries with basic civilization practices. Ghana has been dealing with this for the last couple months, according to the Ghanaian Chronicle. Victims of these horrors have stories and eyewitnesses but apparently not enough courage to relay this information back to the source where all of this started: Policemen. Perhaps policemen and other various law enforcers can vouch that in the heat of a riot, they are not necessarily paying attention to who gets hit by a “warning shot” or who is tear gassed to the point of death. Unfortunately, these practices are being carried from busy, street-filled riots to situations where just one person is involved and is beaten and/or tortured for a crime that they have not even been fairly accused of committing.
In a slight defense of the police, maybe they are humiliating, beating, killing the conspirator of a crime or riot, but without a court case or a trusty eye witness, is it really fair to go through with a punishment? Is beating or killing in the street even the proper function to “teach someone a lesson.” I think not. It leads me to question what kind of training these law enforcers go through. Certainly they are not taught to disregard law in order to enforce it? What these police are doing is illegal, but the victims do not know what action to take in response to being victimized, especially when unrightly so. Furthermore, it’s hard to speak up when your life has been snatched from you at the cost of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Ghanaian victims would like to do something about these injustices, but are unsure where to start, other then to make their account known.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200708220686.html