Countrywide, personnel of the Ghana Police Service have over the years been castigated and insulted by the public due to their supposed uncleanliness and lukewarm attitudes toward maintaining their surroundings at the barracks and even rented homes. For this reason, the Inspector General of Police (IGP) Paul Tawiah Quaye has issued administrative directives to all police personnel in the country to restore their weekly barracks clean up exercise, which existed some years ago. The directive is to reverse the trend of unkempt hedges, dirty gutters and littered surroundings at the various police barracks and all police rented houses in the country. Mr. Quaye warned that Commanders, who failed to supervise the cleaning exercises and provide reports relating to the inspection, would be sanctioned. The Police boss further urged that “apart from the provisions of service instructions 114, which enjoin us to carry out the weekly fatigue, we must at all times remember the saying that ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’.” Mr. Quaye said this at the official launch of ‘You and the Police,’ a programme jointly designed by the Ghana Police Service and TV3 Network in Accra yesterday. The programme, which would run for 13 weeks on the network, starts from 8pm to 8:30pm every Friday. According to him, the television series is aimed at bringing useful information to the viewing public as well as educating them on the operations of the various units of the service. “Through this programme, we intend to project the tenets of democratic policing and propagate the ideals of collaboration in the maintenance of peace and security. By so-doing, we will also be preparing the grounds for the smooth implementation of our community-based policing strategies, which we have captured in our Five-year Strategic National Policing Plan,” Mr. Quaye said. Flushing out miscreants from the service, he admitted, was not an easy task coupled with verbal bombardments from the public on the professional conducts of personnel. But claimed the administration had not relented in that direction. Continuing, the IGP noted that unwarranted castigations and stereotyped judgment by “self-claimed security specialists tend to belittle the real challenges that confront democratic policing.” This, according to him, demoralizes police personnel, who spend sleepless nights to ensure that their mandate of maintaining law and order, protecting lives and property as well preventing crime are executed effectively. He mentioned that in order to effectively perform their duties as law enforcers, they have no option than to fall on well-meaning Ghanaians “especially our friends from the media to partner us in our efforts to restructure and turn the police service into a credible organization. We can only regain our corporate image if the public is completely satisfied with the provision of the services that we have been mandated to render.” On his part, the Chief Executive Officer of TV3, Syed Ahmed Zaidi also explained that the initiative would bring the operations of the service closer to the people while providing an educational platform on how they could protect themselves. He expressed gratitude to the police administration for creating the environment to be part of the fight against crime and other social vices in society. Meanwhile, the Acting Director-General of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID), Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCOP) Prosper Kwame Agblor also addressed the IGP’s parade, held every Wednesday at the Police Headquarters in Accra. The parade, which is reviewed by a senior police officer, was initiated to assess the performance of policemen and women in the service. DCOP Agblor noted that the negative practices by some police officers could be attributed to the ineffective supervisory roles their senior officers play, pointing out that it was an unacceptable development. “It is incumbent on all of us to see to it that the men we supervise do the right things at all times and one way of ensuring this is through supervision. We can make the PIPS unit redundant if we play our supervisory roles properly,” he said. Credit: Nathaniel Yankson Source: http://www.nayank80.blogspot.com/