Reservists to boost police manpower during polling

National Capital District (NCD) Metropolitan Superintendent Gideon Ikumu says the new 156 reservists will boost police manpower to provide security during the general election.
“As we try to reach the 10,000 maximum target of police personnel, there is always a sudden decline in the manpower due to the retirement of aging staff,” Ikumu said.
He said there was a real challenge in policing because currently, the Constabulary had a total of 7,000 plus police nationwide and that was not enough to address all the law and order problems.
“Last year, there was no recruitment but there was a high number of police retirees which created a gap in police manpower,” he said.
Ikumu said under the NCD metropolitan command, there were about 800 police personnel but not all of them were stationed to provide security and fight the high crime rate every day in the city.
“Some policemen were deployed to other provinces and there is less manpower to tackle the increasing crime rate in the city,” he said.
Assistant Commissioner of Police for NCD/Central Anthony Wagambie Jnr said there had been no police recruitment lately due to no proper training facilities at the Bomana Training College.
“We are down with police manpower but we do not have better training facilities to carry out the training they needed to be qualified as police officers,” he said.
“The recent 156 police reservists were lucky enough to have used the training facilities from the Bomana Correctional Services to complete their training and pass out successfully.”
Wagambie said the recruitment of these new reservists was very different from the previous ones because these were professionals who dedicated their time to become police reservists.
“These new reservists are engineers, accountants, lawyers, soldiers, teachers and people with professional backgrounds who volunteered to join as reservists to serve their communities through policing,” he said.
Wagambie said more recruitment should be done by the Constabulary as police manpower was one of the biggest needs.
“We cannot ignore the fact that we do not have enough manpower to fight the increasing crime rate,” he said.