Commissioner of Police responsible for Northern Region, Martha Suwedi, attracted interest at a Community Policing Regional Executive Committee meeting held in Mzuzu, yesterday, when she disclosed that the police use some funds collected by traffic officers to run some operations.<\/p>\n
However, this is contrary to the views of Livingstonia Synod of Church of Central African Presbyterian (CCAP) which believes the money collected by officers is supposed to be directly deposited into the government\u2019s account number one.<\/p>\n
Suwedi\u2019s remarks came after the meeting realised that the police are facing serious underfunding, a development that affects some operations for community policing.<\/p>\n
Responding to the Chairperson for the Community Policing Regional Executive Committee, Kamnkhoti Mkandawire\u2019s, remarks that many community officers do not have enough resources like reflectors and other materials for their operations, Suwedi challenged the meeting that the police can only buy the reflectors using the funds collected on roads<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are facing challenges in some areas because our resources are minimal and this is not only here in the north. But I don\u2019t think we can fail to buy reflectors for community policing. We can just send our boys on roads and from the money they have collected,<\/p>\n
we can buy reflectors within a day. We can, thereafter, replace the money after getting our normal funding,\u201d Suwedi said.<\/p>\n
But Suwedi accused Officers-in-Charge of not conducting community policing executive meetings by using underfunding as a scapegoat.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think stations are relaxing. Funds and lack of resources cannot be a barrier to conduct the meetings. Every station gets its own funding but you have heard for yourself the complaint from the chairperson, meetings are not happening. Go and conduct the meetings, they help to assess performance,\u201d Suwedi said.<\/p>\n
However, Church and Society Programme of Livingstonia Synod Executive Director, Moses Mkandawire, described Suwedi\u2019s remarks as promotion of shortcuts in solving the problems.<\/p>\n
Mkandawire said the police are supposed to make requisition to their headquarters to supply reflectors and other simple resources than using the roads to fundraise for their operations. He said Suwedi\u2019s proposals cannot promote accountability because it is impossible for senior officers to predict total cash that officers collect on the roads.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Commissioner of Police responsible for Northern Region, Martha Suwedi, attracted interest at a Community Policing Regional Executive Committee meeting held in Mzuzu, yesterday, when she disclosed that the police use some funds collected by traffic officers to run some operations. However, this is contrary to the views of Livingstonia Synod of Church of Central African […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":27951,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27950"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27952,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27950\/revisions\/27952"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}