Following Umaru Sanda Amadu’s encounter with some police officers yesterday, there have been calls from individuals, civil society organizations, and some security experts for a change in the mode of how Ghanaian police officers are trained. Most of them blame the alleged unprofessional conduct of the officers on training and trainers [instructors] at the various training schools. This has become a norm – anytime a police officer is caught in any act of indiscipline, instead of dealing with such individuals, people rather take to social media to attack trainers and the mode of training. One popular Facebooker, Kwame Sarpong Asiedu writes, “the Umaru Sanda Amadu video demonstrates how poorly our Police are trained on customer service”. Dr. Steve Manteaw, a policy analyst, and a former Chairman, Public Interest and Accountability Committee [PIAC] also writes, “We need to urgently take another look at police recruitment and training in this country if we want to improve standards”.
Respectfully, fellow Ghanaians, we can’t always blame an individual’s unprofessional conduct on training. Let’s deal with individuals who act contrary to laid down procedures and leave the institution or how they are being trained out of the issue. No matter what training personnel goes through, we will still have some of them indulging in conducts such as these. All policemen were trained at the same training schools and by the same instructors. Are we then saying that all police officers are unprofessional? If not, why is it that the majority conduct themselves professionally and others do not if we want to always blame the mode of training?
Blaming police training for an individual’s misconduct is like saying that doctors are not being trained properly, because one doctor negligently left a piece of towel in the womb of a client, or it’s like saying that a pharmacist has given wrong medication to a client, therefore, all pharmacists are not being trained well. In other words, we should be blaming nurses training school teachers for the misconduct of a single nurse. We see journalists misbehave/conduct themselves unprofessionally on daily basis, but nobody blames the Ghana Institute of Journalism for that. What about that! We are in this country where doctors’ negligence on duty resulted in the death of patients, but nobody blamed the medical schools for their negligence. Why the Police?
The fact is that some policemen everywhere in the world, including developed countries [America, UK, Canada, and Russia], etc., indulge in unprofessional conduct, such as the one we are discussing – should we blame that on how they were trained? Certainly not!.
As much as it is legitimate /right for citizens to call for change in the mode of recruitment and training our law enforcement agents, let’s give some credit to instructors at our various training schools; the daily blame on the training for an individual’s unprofessional conduct is becoming too much. There’s no perfect institution in this world.
Email: ckkpeli@gmail.com
Source: Mybrytfmonline.com
