Kumasi, March 11, GNA - The Police Administration has vowed to ensure stringent measures to block the entry of social miscreants into the Service.

Mr Paul Tawiah Quaye, Inspector General of Police, said they were determined to restore public confidence and salvage the waning image of the police.

Recruitment of people with dubious characters, he said, had been the bane of their poor image.

"We have compromised our recruitment regulations to such an extent that people with questionable characters have found their way into our midst and this is impacting negatively on our performance", he told a meeting of senior officers and men in Kumasi on his maiden visit to the Ashanti Region.

He said discipline was the bedrock of every organization and 93the police with its rigid command and control structure buys into this without any reservation. The organizational culture, values and norms of the service explicitly portray tenets of discipline." "Over the years, however, we have allowed complacency, adulteration of our rules and regulations and undue outside influence to pollute our procedures and affect our command and control structures." The IGP said the new initiative of the Service is to make sure that all officers actively focused on 93citizen-friendly" policing that would help reverse the existing negative public perception of the police.

"We are in a new era of transparency and accountability, an era of image cleansing where the imperative requirement of constitutional democratic practices impose on the police the need to adopt standard democratic principles in the execution of our statutory mandate." "We must adopt citizen-centred approaches which enjoin us to respect the sensitivities and human rights protection as a major consideration in our security delivery", Mr Quaye told them. He expressed concern about the proliferation of small arms, majority of which are illegally acquired and used to commit crimes in the West Africa sub-region and called for effective and proactive measures to deal with the situation.