Crooked Cops

The article I’m choosing to blog about comes from allafrica.com. It’s out of Harare and is entitled “Who will police the police?” According to the article, a scary new trend recently is for police to be involved in armed robberies and other crimes they are supposed to stopping. According to Joyce Moyo in the article, the society has become a very worrisome one. Some say the root of the problem is that the police aren’t being paid enough and their low salaries are pushing them to commit crimes instead of prevent them. Recently, there was an arrest of seven policemen who went "rogue" or went criminal I suppose. It says that these are not the first arrests of policemen and won’t be the last either. These police are committing and/or serving as an accomplice to criminals in armed robberies because they are being promised large rewards which is attractive to these policemen because they don't have as high as salaries as they hope for and in some cases need. Some are even using their service weapons to do commit crimes. The policemen who were recently arrested are suspected of killing three people in the process of one robbery that they did. Crimes have been happening country wide, not just in one area either. Andrew Phiri quoted in the article said, “We do not choose if you are a doctor, teacher, soldier, policemen or vendor. We will arrest you if you break the law.” I think he put it very well.

I think this article is really depressing. These people can’t even trust their own policemen when illegal things are going on. I know there are crooked cops in the States too, but this is a huge problem in Harare right now. Many, many police are believed to be involved in these crimes, even murder, not just robberies or petty thefts. They’re really doing a horrible thing I think because these men are supposed to be people you can trust and call for help when you need it and they themselves are the criminals, who use their weapons that are provided by the government and that are supposed to protect you, to harm you. Armed-robberies, murders, and money crimes are all being done by the local policemen. It makes me thankful I'm from a small place with low crime numbers.