Out of the number, 22  trainees were dismissed  from the Puwalugu Police Training School in the Upper East Region, 10  from the Kumasi Police Training School in the Ashanti Region, five from the Police Training School in the Greater Accra Region, two from the Police Training School in Koforidua, Eastern Region, while two were from the Ho Police Training School in the Volta Region.

The affected trainees, who have been arrested, were recruited on November 15, 2016 and had been in the training schools for the past four months.

The police trainees, who have been granted police bail, are said to have either altered results on their certificates or changed the names on the certificates.

Others were also found to have submitted certificates belonging to the opposite sex.

Investigations

Briefing the Daily Graphic in Accra yesterday, the Director of the Public Affairs Directorate of the Ghana Police Service, Superintendent Mr Cephas Arthur, said the dismissal of the recruits was part of background investigation being undertaken by the Police Administration to prevent undesirable persons from the Ghana Police Service.

He said the process would continue to the end of the six-month training process for the newly recruited personnel in the various police training schools across the country.

“We are still doing background checks on the recruits that we have in our training schools and anytime we stumble on any fact that will make someone unsuitable to be a police officer, we will expel the person,” he said.

Verification

As part of  the process to verify  some of the academic credentials of the trainees, Mr Arthur said, the documents of the trainees were forwarded to the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) for assessment and verification and some of them were found to have been forged.

He said the trainees dismissed from the Police Training School in Kumasi had been put before  the Kumasi Circuit Court and granted bail by the court to reappear next week.

The others, he said, who had also been charged for impersonation and forgery of documents, among other offences, had been granted police enquiry bail, while they were being processed for court.

Mr Arthur cautioned that the law would be brought to bear on all the expelled recruits for  forging their academic documents, an act which was a criminal offence, and for deceiving public officers in the submission of their documents to be recruited into the Ghana Police Service.

Background

To qualify for police training, applicants are required to have obtained a WAEC certificate or higher, be Ghanaians between the ages of 18 and 25.

Applicants must also have an average height of 173 centimetres or 5.8 feet for males and 165 centimetres and 5.4 feet for females. Additionally, they should have no criminal record and be medically fit.

In February 2017, the Police Administration dismissed 206 new recruits who were undergoing training at the Pwalugu Police Training School in the Upper East Region because they did not meet the academic requirements for recruitment into the service.