On arrests before probes
Recently, the Malawi Human Rights Commission (MHRC) expressed dissatisfaction with the police conduct of arresting offenders before investigating them.
To MHRC, this is injustice and a violation of suspect’s constitutional rights.
The commission, therefore, asked the police to stop this practice and arrest people upon full investigations.
This is a bold statement that should be applauded in any democratic society.
Malawian courts have repeatedly upheld that it is no excuse to deny an accused person bail simply because the police have not finished investigations.
Some suspects have been granted bail after Courts ruled against this common objection from police prosecutors.
Defence lawyers now happily shoot down investigations as a ground for objecting bail application.
Without shielding the police, the public need to understand why the police arrest some suspects and do investigations afterwards.
It is not always wrong for the police to arrest suspects before completing investigations
There are some cases where arrests have to follow investigations.
For starters, 90 percent of police arrests are initiated by the public complaints to the law enforcers. The police do not witness the alleged crime being committed unless they were patrolling the streets, bus depots and trading centres.
However, the reality is that the police are usually called into action when a crime is reported to them.
Now, imagine a person has reported a defilement case as was the case in which a Chinese national allegedly sexually assaulted a child of his worker.
Do the police have to wait for investigations to arrest the suspect?
The primary aim here is to protect the girl-child from this alleged defiler. By the time the police finish investigations, how many times would the child have been defiled?
A prompt arrest is ideal in this situation.
The police cannot wait to finish investigations when the pervert has an opportunity to continue defiling the victim.
This defeats the whole purpose of protecting a girl-child that the same courts advance in defilement cases.
Then, there are highly publicised cases any prosecutor finds hard to prosecute. These are cases where the public hastily pronounce judgement without looking at the evidence, but based on what others are saying on the social media.
In cases like these, arrests before investigations are ideal for two goals: protecting the accused from mob justice and restoring public trust in the police service.
In such cases, police delay resulting from further investigations is often misunderstood and rumoured as an indication of corruption.
The problem with our society is that it has elevated some individuals and worships them as the ‘gods of thinking.
The venerated thinkers have become public influencers to the extent that their opinions, whether credible or suspicious, are taken as gospel truth by the majority.
The moment these people comment on any arrest, the suspect is condemned. The social influencers have the power to influence the minds of many and the majority of their followers simply align their thinking with them.
This puts pressure on the police to make arrests even when they have no evidence to convict the suspects.
Take for example a case in which a clinician in Zomba was framed for defilement of a two-year-old girl.
The criminal justice system was put under public pressure only for the accused clinician to be acquitted by the court.
In such instances, making arrests without further investigations was ideal to protect the accused from mob justice.
It is therefore wrong for both the MHRC and our courts to simply shoot down the reason of further investigation as an excuse.
Each case must be looked on its merit. Certainly there are instances where an arrest before investigations is ideal and the police cannot be faulted for it.
The commission should be the first to understand the environment our police operate.
It is true that the police must make arrests after investigations, but to every rule there is an exception.
Each case must be judged based on its own merit.
