A tough year for us: Mondiai

THIS year has been termed as one of the difficult years for policing in Lae city.
Lae city metropolitan Chief Supt Nema Mondiai said although they faced policing difficulties, they were able to overcome them.
“This year is one of our complicated years. We had problems with manpower, logistics and transport.
“Despite all this, we were able to deliver the services that were needed.
“I credit all of you for this.
“It was your efforts in the name of policing that we were able to perform so well,” he said
during their final parade and his Christmas and New Year message to
his officers at Bumbu Police Barracks last Wednesday.
He said even in the New Year, they would still face manpower, logistics and transport problems even though the police department had the largest share in the Public Servant’s category of the 2010 budget.
“The allocation of K1million for logistics in this year’s budget is insufficient,” Chief Supt Mondiai said.
“This is not enough to buy new vehicles.
“So it means we won’t have any new fleets next year so we will continue to make do with what resources we have on our hands right now,” he said.
Chief Supt Mondiai said they were down with manpower to police the city and since there were no major recruitments in the past years, it  was not clear if they would have additional manpower in the coming year.
The numbers are slowly decreasing due to officers resigning and retiring from active duties.
During the parade, he also thanked the local MP Bart Philemon, through the JDP&BPC, for giving Lae police station a facelift.
Their request was well received with the refurbishment of the police station, new generator to the continuous power outages and the improvements to the cell blocks.
He said with these
difficulties as named,  they had to extend their networking with other stakeholders like the business communities and politicians so they deliver the services needed.
As this was a festive period,  Chief Supt Mondiai said there were two operations in place.
First was the road safety operations which started two weeks ago.
The other one is a joint operation with the Correctional Services officers to hunt down escapees from the Buimo CIS last week which commenced over the weekend.