Police recruitment to focus on ICT certificate holders
The Ghana Police Service is considering giving preference to people with Information and Communications Technology (ICT) background in its future enlistment programmes, the Director of the Cyber Crime Unit of the service, Chief Superintendent of Police Dr Herbert Gustave Yankson, has said.
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It has also resolved to train some of its investigators to enhance their capacity to handle cyber crimes at all levels.
In an interview with the Daily Graphic in Accra yesterday, Dr Yankson said those considerations had become necessary in view of the rising spate of cyber crimes and the need to contain them.
Currently, the Cyber Crime Unit of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) is inundated with cyber crime complaints.
Cyber crime is criminal activity carried out by means of computers or the Internet. Cyber crime covers areas such as fraud, unauthorised access into systems or network to alter information and child pornography.
Dr Yankson said all the stations were currently referring cyber crime complaints to the unit, saying, “So if they are all pushing cases to us, you can just imagine the kind of load that we are likely to have.”
Referral
He said the Commissioner of the CID had agreed that some of the investigators were trained to “start tackling the investigation of such cases at the station level”
Dr Yankson said the intent was that the unit at the headquarters would be a referral place, instead of the current situation where all the cases were referred to it.
He explained that issues concerning networks could be handled directly by the headquarters.
Dr Yankson said since the creation of the Cyber Crime Unit, all police stations in the region had been referring cyber crimes to it and wondered what happened to victims outside the region.
“So that is one of the challenges that we have that we are working on,” he explained, adding that in the recent recruitment, people with IT background were given preference.
He was hopeful that by the end of the year the CID would have had newly recruited policemen with IT backgrounds and would have also trained enough investigators at the station levels.
He said cyber crime was rampant, especially with the advent of mobile money, where people were swindled to part with huge sums of money, only to realise later that they had been duped.