Government allocates GH¢800m extra to support Police Service – Minister
Mr Ambrose Dery, the Minister for the Interior, has said government provided GH¢800 million extra last year to the Ghana Police Service for the execution of its duties.
He said 160 weapons were also given to the Service at the end of 2017 and 200 cars at the end of 2018, and assured the Police of more support in the years ahead.
The Minister made this known during a visit to the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) Headquarters of the Ghana Police Service in Accra on Friday.
Mr Dery said the President, Nana Addo Dankwah Akufo-Addo has observed the effective work of the Service and is prepared to empower them and provide them with the requisite logistics.
“We know you are working but we need you to do it professionally, diligently, and expeditiously,” he said.
He urged the public to give out information pertaining to crimes to the Police first and not the media saying, “Sometimes, when the information is given to the media first, it is distorted and by the time it gets to the police, the worse could have happened already”.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCOP) Maame Yaa Tiwaa Addo-Danquah, the Director General of the CID, said the Department has 32 units at the headquarters out of which 14 play various roles with regards to investigations.
In order to improve the services rendered to the citizenry, DCOP Addo-Danquah said the CID organised a rigorous detective investigative training for 1,390 officers in 2018 within a period of six to seven weeks.
Additionally, 192 DOVVSU officers were trained as well as 151 firearms officers.
She said the Service has been able to develop a central database where cases being handled by investigators could be monitored and tracked.
In terms of the case tracking management system, the Service has covered Accra, Tema and Volta regions onto the database and were preparing to cover the Ashanti and Central regions until the whole country have been covered, she said.
“The idea of the case tracking management system is to improve supervision where crime officers throughout the country would go to the database and save instructions for us at the headquarters to monitor how they are managing cases,” she said.
DCOP Addo-Danquah said this is because many cases have been left under investigation and not brought to a closure, therefore, the case tracking management system would ensure that cases under investigation are reduced to the barest minimum and brought to a closure.
The Director General appealed to the Government to get the Service digital investigative tools, as they could not continue to use the manual way of investigating cases, which is not effective.
She called on Government to construct an operational Digital Forensic Lab stocked with tools for the Service, because it hires private forensic labs for most of its investigations.
DCOP Addo-Danquah said the Service has a Resource Centre currently under construction at the Detective Training School and it would be used for deliberations and assessments on how successful or wrong an investigation was conducted.
She said the Centre after construction, would also give the investigators an opportunity to observe and learn from the operations of other Police Service globally, using the online connectivity.
Source: GNA