SHAKE-UP IN POLICE * IGP hints

Front Page: Daily Graphic, May 20, 2009.
Story: Albert K. Salia
THE Inspector General of Police (IGP), Mr Paul Quaye, yesterday gave an indication of a shake-up at the top hierarchy of the Police Service and across the country within the next couple of days.
The changes are expected to begin at the Police Headquarters and then spread to the regional commands.
“Some of the changes will be immediate, especially those that do not require financial commitments but just the administrative movement of personnel to fit into the appropriate job specifications of their qualifications and professional competencies,” he said.
He told the Daily Graphic after outlining his vision to personnel at the Police Headquarters in Accra that the changes formed part of the performance re-engineering he sought to bring on board to ensure that the police employed approved and accepted practices in the delivery of services to all stakeholders.
Mr Quaye said all those who were not supposed to be where they currently were would be taken to areas where they would best deliver.
He said efforts had been made in the past to introduce some of those reforms but without success due to internal resistance.
He said some of the reforms were all embedded in the Strategic Direction Policy Document of the Police which he intended to implement to turn the service around.
He had earlier told the personnel that it was his objective to implement systematically short to medium-term national policing plans aimed at significantly improving the maintenance of law and order and the protection of life and property.
He said he would embark on a major internal restructuring and capacity-building of the service with the view to effectively and efficiently utilising to maximum benefit the limited human and logistic resources of the service.
Mr Quaye said he would develop a professionally competent workforce through systematic core and related training and development.
“In this connection, regular in-service training programmes will be introduced for all officers and men of the service with a view to sharpening their professional skills and keeping them constantly abreast of contemporary developments in policing, with particular focus on the Ghanaian society,” he said.
According to the IGP, in those courses emphasis would be on integrity, discipline, leadership and management skills, fairness in dealing with the public and the retention of staff in core operational roles.
Mr Quaye said he would set specific goals and targets for all police stations, districts, units, divisions and regions against which performance could be measured periodically.
“The aggregate results will then be analysed in the context of our overall national objectives. This way, negative variances reflecting non-performance or under-performance can be immediately identified, evaluated and rectified. Our main control mechanism will be the effective monitoring of performance at all levels,” he stated.
He said he would ensure that the police get a comprehensive and reliable database to facilitate crime investigations, policing research and the prosecution of the functions of the service.
The IGP noted that the image of the service had not been the best in recent times as a result of indiscipline and other forms of unprofessional conduct of some few bad lots among its members.
Touching on other areas, Mr Quaye said his administration would urgently address the need for broad community engagement in all aspects of policing where all social, political, economic and cultural exigencies of the Ghanaian society would be actively involved in the law enforcement enterprise, using modern policing strategies in police-community relations practices, neighbourhood watch techniques, among others.
He explained that the need for total societal involvement was based on the recognition that policing must be made more holistic, since individuals living in society were stakeholders in whatever the police did.
“For effective policing, it will be important for such agencies as the Town and Country Planning Department, metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies to work in tandem towards designing a system of road/street naming, housing numbering which will make it easy for the police, upon receiving reports on crimes, to quickly move to the specific crime scenes without having to meander through a mass of unnumbered houses/buildings which have no specific location addresses and descriptions,” he said.
The IGP said experience showed that delays encountered by the police in such situations often led to loss of precious time and consequently loss of lives and property.
Mr Quaye said his administration intended to mobilise both academic and private sector resources to complement government’s efforts at helping the police in achieving their constitutional mandate.
He said he would also enhance existing relations with other sister security agencies within the country, as well as international and sub-regional crime-combating organisations such as INTERPOL and the West African Chiefs of Police Conference, with the aim of fighting the menace of trans-national crimes, especially human trafficking, the narcotic trade, money laundering, counterfeiting, terrorism, among others.
He made it clear that modern policing within national territorial boundaries could not achieve the best of results without the co-operation of other agencies beyond Ghana.
“Together, we can implement the strategic interventions I have enumerated in order to achieve a world-class level of policing based on the principle of collective responsibility,” he concluded.