The late Lance Corporal Amuzu
The Police Administration has acted on personnel with mental challenges and those suffering from alcohol addiction.
DAILY GUIDE has learnt that regional, divisional and district commanders have been ordered to report such personnel suffering from the aforementioned challenges for the necessary action to be taken.
Commanders who fail to comply with this directive would be sanctioned by the Police Administration, DAILY GUIDE has gathered.
The directive appears to have been triggered by the recent fatal shooting by the late Amuzu, the cop who ran amok and killed his mother-in-law and kids and himself in Tema.
Many questioned why the Police’s Domestic Violence and Victim Support Unit (DOVVSU) treated a policeman who threatened to kill his wife with kids’ gloves even as the IGP who chanced upon the now widow making a report about the threat, ordered his detention.
He was released the following day and without being examined for psychiatric challenges, he was issued with a firearm to go on patrol duties. This, many who followed the story found absurd, and a shirking of responsibility on the part of DOVVSU officials who handled the case.
A DAILY GUIDE editorial wondered why the DOVVSU which handled the case failed to exhaust all means of managing the matter but rather let it go as though nothing was at stake.
Perhaps had a psychiatric attention been ordered, the fatalities which followed could have been obviated, angry persons stated after the incident.
The Executive Director of Basic Needs, a non-governmental organization, Badimak Peter Yaro recently told a state newspaper, the Ghanaian Times that “more than 2.4 million Ghanaians, representing about 10 per cent of the population, are suffering from mental illness according to the 2010 population census.”
Mental health, he is reported to have said, has not received the needed attention adding that “people have not understood mental health well and even government’s appreciation of the need to invest in mental health has been low”.
According to him the centralization of mental health care and the stigma patients suffer from the community at large is the reason those who need attention do not do so.
Mental conditions, he said, were treatable and that there was no point in discriminating against mental patients because “it is a condition anyone could suffer from.”
By A.R. Gomda