Dr. George Akuffo Dampare, the Inspector General of Police (IGP) has restated that the police administration will never accept the tag of ‘most corrupt institution’ despite recent research findings to that effect.
Dampare made the comment when he delivered a public lecture at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, KNUST, on Thursday, August 11, 2022.
Whiles rejecting the corruption tag, he stressed that the police hierarchy was doing everything within its power to weed out bad officers whose actions stain the entire service.
“We decided to assess ourselves from your perspectives. We have been tagged as unprofessional, corrupt and what have you.
“We are not denying that we may have some recalcitrant officers amongst us, we are doing all we can to pluck them out. But we will never accept that we are the most corrupt institution.
“It is unfortunate, all those researches are questionable. They have challenges,” he added.
In late July 2022, Dampare stated that the police had over the years been affected by pervasive stereotyping with respect to corruption perception.
This, he believes, has made the Ghana Police Service, the default choice for most corrupt institution by most research findings.
In a five-page letter titled ‘Police Administration’s Response to your Corruption in Ghana Research Report,’ and addressed to a collective that published a corruption report, the police chief said there was the high likelihood that the findings of the survey were affected by stereotyping.
“There is also the real risk that your research may have been affected by a historically pervasive stereotyping of the Police Service. The Service has almost now become the default choice for such research and has therefore encourage a deep-seated public stereotype over the years.
“This stereotype may easily influence respondent choices and it is there fair to expect that you factor it in assessing the validity of your findings,” he wrote.
The statement also punched holes in procedural and analytical processes employed in the survey, among others questioning the selective aggregation or disaggregation of institutions by the researchers as well as unclear processes with respect to data collection and analysis.
Per its findings, the Ghana Police Service, Ghana Immigration Service and Ghana Revenue Authority personnel topped the list of officials who take bribes with percentage points of 53.2%. 37.4% and 33.6% respectively.
But IGP Dampare said the Police Service upon a thorough analysis of the report found that “the research and its findings are heavily challenged and corrupted from both the academic and practice point of view.”
A week after the report by the three institutions, i.e. Commission for Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) in collaboration with the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), an Afrobarometer report by the Center for Democratic Development-Ghana (CDD-Ghana) has also ranked police as the most corrupt institution with the Presidency and Parliament completing the top three slots.
ghanaweb.com