While Coronavirus has caused much misery around the world, for Tonota Station Commander, Oteng Ngada and his officers, the pandemic proved a valuable help in keeping crime down over the festive Holidays.
In an exclusive interview with The Voice this week, the top cop revealed the recent festive holidays had been a great success from a policing perspective.
“We had the best festive season ever!” he exclaimed, attributing the 7 pm Covid-19 curfew as playing a big part in the low crime rate.
However, Ngada admitted that over the just-ended Christmas holidays – 23 December to 4 January – his station recorded a slight rise in both rapes and burglaries compared to the corresponding 2019 season.
“We had a bit of a problem with house break-ins and rape. People have a tendency of going to the villages and not alerting the neighbours, leaving their houses with no one to look after them. And the thieves also conduct a survey checking on the houses where the owners are not in and make a break-in,” explained Ngada, adding 10 break-ins were reported over the festive holidays compared to eight in 2019.
Over the 13-day time frame, the cops recorded eight rapes and attempted rapes compared to five last year.
“Rape in most cases in our jurisdiction is caused by ex-boyfriends and friends. Most of the time the incidents happen after drinking whereby a former boyfriend or friend buys alcohol for the woman so they get drunk and then they rape them.”
The top cop went on to say, “Generally crime was low in terms of petty crimes like assaults and using of insulting language, which is mostly used at the depots and since they were no depots crime went down.”
Breaking down the crime statistics further, Ngada said he did not record a single incident of murder, suicide, stock theft, or robbery.
The year before, one murder, one suicide, four stock theft, and 10 defilement cases were recorded.