N’Dranou: K5000 to get case fully prosecuted

By JACKLYN SIRIAS
It costs police K5000 to get one simple case successfully prosecuted in the courts, National Capital District Metropolitan Superintendent Perou N’Dranou says.
He told The National why cases were being thrown out of courts without being properly and successfully prosecuted.
“It is difficult when we have limited resources and logistics as we need to reach out to the people who are our witnesses to come forward and give us information to do proper reports to be presented by prosecutors in the court of law,” N’Dranou said.
He gave an example of a man from Abau in Central, he came to the city to do his shopping and was involved in a car accident in Port Moresby.
“When we are collecting evidence and we need him to testify too as he might have some very useful information to successfully have the case in court, we need to reach out to him.”
N’Dranou said in order to reach him, they could not ask him to go and come on several occasions just to give his information so they had to get to him in his village.
“To do that we will need logistics like vehicle, money for fuel, human resource to reach out so that we can talk to our witness,” he said.
“This is just an example but imagine if we are able to provide all these resources just to reach out to our witnesses, it will cost us more than K5000 to successfully complete files to submit to the court for successful prosecution.
“So if we reported about 20 cases a day multiplied by K5000, that is the money that we do not have and that’s something the public needs to understand as well,” N’Dranou said.
He said that because they lacked a lot of those important facilities, logistics and resources, they could not reach their witnesses in remote places and that’s how they could not collect enough evidence to have cases dealt with. So many times the cases were thrown out due to insufficient evidence.