No more 'Monkey duties' - IGP

Page 31: Daily Graphic, January 26, 2010.
Story: Albert K. Salia
THE Inspector General of Police (IGP), Mr Paul Tawiah Quaye, has warned commanders of the Ghana Police Service who engage personnel of the service on privately arranged guard duties, popularly called “monkey duties”, to put an end to the practice or dance to the music.
He said the use of personnel for “monkey duties” was partially responsible for the non-availability of personnel for core police duties and the slow demise of specialised units.
Regrettably, he said, such police commanders often charged fees for their personal benefits and warned that who engaged in such practice would take the consequences.
Mr Quaye told the Daily Graphic that the message was succinctly sent to the various regional commanders and heads of specialised units at the just-ended National Police Commanders Conference at the weekend.
He said another area of concern related to abuses was the fuel distribution and allocation system in the service.
According to him, while the police cried of fuel shortages, some individuals were constantly diverting, siphoning or stealing the little that were allocated to the service.
“The situation is reportedly worse in the regions where fuel is off-loaded into private fuel dumps,” he stated.
Mr Quaye, who was inducted into office on Sunday, therefore, appealed to all regional commanders to step up their supervisory functions in this direction and indicated that the Police Administration would cause internal and external auditors to pay unannounced visits to audit the stock levels and verify the accuracy of consumption levels.
He said the commanders had also been tasked to help erase the notion that the police “were the angels of doom” as their presence on the streets with its potential deterrence against criminality was rarely noticed each time there was trouble.
He noted that over the years, policing strategies seemed to have been reactionary, which meant that crimes were committed before the police rushed to the scene, arrested suspects where possible, and investigated cases to build dockets.
“This approach to policing does not place the imperative importance of crime prevention into focus, since many lives and property were often lost before we embarked upon the processes of investigations, prosecutions etc.,” he said.
Mr Quaye, therefore, advocated for the use of problem-solving approaches, explaining that “the concept of problem solving policing works preventively to change conditions that lead to crime rather than responding over and over again to individual incidents”.
The IGP said efforts of the police in 2010 would be geared towards the systematic adoption and decentralisation of the problem-solving policing approaches, saying that “we will accordingly respond promptly, courteously and sympathetically to requests made by the public”.
He reminded personnel at various checkpoints and roadblocks that “soliciting directly or indirectly for alms and favours from road users is a very despicable act which brings the image of the service into disrepute and should, therefore, not be tolerated”.