Police recruitment flawed, commissioner must act

Letters

Normal police recruitment is hijacked by those people in position of power in the recruitment section at the headquarters.
Police brutality is becoming rampant – a frequent phenomenon in the daily newspapers. There are incidents of police brutality week-in week-out. The public seems to be asking why this is so.
The answer is simple and that is, there is no proper screening when recruiting new trainees.
Most of the trainees recruited are a bunch of Grade 10 and 12 dropouts using other people’s certificates.
They get in by bribing the recruitment officers or people in-charge of police recruitments with big amounts of money.
For this year’s police recruitment, people have been seen using money to make their way in for police training. The public is aware of the network that is existing where money is channelled through to seeking favouritism for selection into the police force.
This will become a norm and will be deeply rooted and hard to resolve if the concerned  officers in the police hierarchy do not intervene and do something about it now.
While I  condemn the actions of  only few greedy police officers who are seen fit to do that, I am very supportive of the NCD- Central Commander Assistant Commissioner Sylvester Kalaut’s comments made during the Commissioner’s Conference in Kimbe, I would also like to add that, there were instances where people were taking huge amount of money around to bribe police officers in-charge of recruitment so this is now a wakeup call for the Police Commissioner, his two deputies and concerned Assistant Commissioner for Personnel and Recruitment Directorate  to ensure that this year’s selection and recruitment process must be transparent  and fair where by young  and genuine school leavers must be recruited into the police force and provide them sufficient training so that they uphold the law when it comes to enforcing the law.
Those renegade police officers bringing disrepute and tarnishing the good name of the police force could be the ones the formal education system rejected but somehow made their way into the police force using fake certificates or by bribing police officers.
The Commissioner of Police should crack the whip on such police officers who continue to demean and bring dispute to the majority of good police officers and the department as a whole.

Concerned Citizen
Port Moresby