The Ghana Police Service has revealed that it has made a policy to serve food to officers deployed to enforce government’s restrictions on movements in some parts of the country to avoid officers jeopardising the environment by contracting and transmitting COVID-19 while searching for food to buy on duty.

As part of measures to prevent further spread of COVID-19, government restricted movement in certain parts of the country for two weeks including Kasoa, the Greater Accra and Ashanti Regions which took effect from Monday, 30 March 2020.

The Police Administration in a statement on Monday, 6 April, 2020 said: “It has monitored reports about rotation provided for its officers deployed to enforce restrictions on movement and wishes to state that the administration has made a policy to serve food to its officers.”

It noted that its decision is based on the reasons including “To avoid the situation where police officers would roam in this critical time, leaving their duty points to search for food, water or soft drink. Some of the duty points are situated at places where officers cannot find food or water to buy, the frontline officers will not jeopardise the environment by taking risks of contracting and transmitting the coronavirus disease” and “ to discourage officers from taking cooked food from members of the public without approval of their commanders so that the officers’ feeding can be properly monitored for health and safety reasons.”

The Police also encouraged the general public to “cooperate with security services and stay home as directed” and urged “the media, opinion leaders and all who have the opportunity of speaking to others” to support the stay home directives by government to help stop the spread of COVID-19 in Ghana.