Govt to revamp forensic lab with EU grant

Page 48: D aily Graphic, July 14, 2009.
Story: Albert K. Salia
THE government has secured a two-million-euro grant from the European Union (EU) for the revamping of the Police Forensic Laboratory.
The collapsed building of the Detective Training School is also to be reconstructed within the next two years to offer training for detectives.
The Inspector General of Police (IGP), Mr Paul Quaye, who announced this in Accra yesterday, noted that the collapse of the detective training school and the deplorable state of the forensic laboratory had hampered successful investigations.
He was speaking in Accra at the opening of a six-day training course to develop the professional competencies of senior detectives drawn from the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) headquarters and the Accra and Tema regions.
Mr Quaye said the detective school played a pivotal role in producing world-class detectives, who served as the bedrock for the successful detection, investigation and prosecution of many high-profile criminal cases in the country.
“The collapse of the school has had significant negative ramifications for crime management in the country, since many detectives working on cases in recent times have not been formally trained,” he said, adding that “that could probably explain the increasing level of cases still under investigations as our crime statistics are low”.
He said the consistent high number of unresolved cases was worrying and pointed out that the success or otherwise of the course would be measured by the number of cases that they were able to resolve afterwards.
On the forensic laboratory, he said apart from its deplorable state, it had been under-utilised and attributed it to the insufficient awareness of detectives of its potency in authenticating disputed exhibits before the law courts.
Mr Quaye reminded the personnel that if they succeeded in preventing all preventable crimes but failed in detecting all detectable crimes then they had failed as the prime internal security agency of the country.
The IGP, therefore, urged the participants to not only stay focussed on the course but familiarise themselves as a brotherhood of crime officers to facilitate information sharing.
The Director-General of the CID, DCOP Frank Adu-Poku, noted that crime detection and investigation was a specialised field requiring constant training of the personnel.
He said to be able to rise up to the challenges of modern crime, security personnel needed to be constantly trained and resourced.