‘Discipline force aging’

National, Normal
Source:

By JUNIOR UKAHA

A RECENT study has shown that Papua New Guinea’s police force and correctional services are dominated by “aging” officers.
George Bopi, a private researcher with the Labour Market Assessment Consultants stressed this, saying that the study, while highlighted this, showed that the only exception was the defence force.
 Bopi said that the current cohort of personnel that make up the bulk of the police and correctional services (CS) staff were people within the age group of 40 years and above.
He said that of the few thousand officers actively serving in the country, half of them were serving in administrative positions and not on the ground engaging in operations.
Bopi told the Vision 2050 consultative gathering at the Hideaway Hotel yesterday that this posed a serious threat to issues of internal security and general law and order challenges and that this must immediately be addressed.
He said for the correctional services, the dominant age group was 43 years and above,  whereas for the police force the dominant age group was 42 years and above, just one year less than that of the warders.
According to Bopi, the defence force was quite steady as most of the old officers were no longer serving in active duties.
He said this was mainly due to the defence force retrenchment exercises carried out in recent years.
Bopi added that the main reason why the correctional services and the police force were made up mostly of aging public servants was that there was a current freeze in the recruitment drive in both organisations since 1994.
He said that although the findings were verifiable, they were nevertheless based on solid but wide-ranging research studies carried out by his team.
This included the correspondence with police and CS human resources managers and the issuing and collecting of research questionnaires from subjects.