Security expert, Dr. Kwesi Aning says naming a new substantive Inspector General of Police will not resolve the many challenges the Ghana Police Service is currently facing.
Instead, he says, there needs to be a total restructuring of the service with the recommendations made by various commissions over the years being taken into consideration.
“Is it about the IGP-ship? It is about the whole structure. We need more than that, we need structural change, we need to ask, what is policing about? When we say police structure, police professionalism, what do we mean, what are the tools and structure we need for a rapidly changing population, increasingly young, frustrated, having access to social media? Crime has changed, are we equipping frontline officers in a manner that allows them to respond to crime in a proactive manner?”
A critical relook at the current system, he believes will go a long way to improve the police service in all regards including professionalism and crime-fighting and yield better results for the service.
“We need to really take a couple of steps back and say what kind of policing do we need, do we have enough mechanisms and processes that first can insulate the service and allow it to use its own internal mechanisms for appointments, for promotions, for exams, for marking. We have a panoply of inquiry and commission report that if we had followed through, we wouldn’t be facing these challenges.”
He further highlighted the failure of the police service and interference by political authorities as key contributing factors to the lack of effectiveness in the establishment of rules.
“Failure of political authority plus the institution itself to insist that we’ll work by the rule that needs to be established. We must note that there are rules of service in the police so we must ask when that changed”.
“What is the long term impact of not allowing the service to deliver optimally because over time people become threatened, insecure, unwilling and unprepared to do what they know to be professionally right because they are afraid of being transferred, being demoted, being threatened, because they need money, they’ve got to pay school fees. So that’s what we are seeing now, a service that has lost the gravitas”.
