PNG police change recruitment to address ill-discipline

Transcript

The Papua New Guinea police constabulary is revamping its recruitment process in an effort to address discipline problems plaguing the force.

Police Commissioner Gary Baki says the maximum recruitment age has been lifted to 35 in an effort to allow more mature people into the force.

Mr Baki says the length of time spent training will also be raised from six to 18 months.

The Commissioner told Koro Vaka'uta why the changes were needed.

PNG Police at the 2015 Pacific Islands Forum meeting. Photo: RNZI / Koro Vaka'uta

GARY BAKI: There is so much incidences of police brutality that's been levelled against us. I think there are elements of very important aspects of training that we should be adding to our training syllabus that will help our policemen and women and help them understand why they have to do their job. I want the university to assist us in doing an audit of the recruitment training programme so that there is aspects of sociology and all these kinds of things that need to be built into so that we can understand the behaviour of the people we are serving. At the moment, six months is too short in the sense of what we teach our recruitment's which surrounds elements of law and not so much on the society that they are expected to serve.  That is basically the reason that has drawn me into deciding to review the training syllabus in the college.  It's timely now, considering the fact that our aspirations are for modernising the constabulary but at the same time converting Bomana into a centre of excellence. I really want to build a police officer, both academically as well to, in the sense that when they get outside, they know the type of society they are serving.

KORO VAKA'UTA: And also I notice you will be changing the recruitment gap, what does that mean?

GB:  It's a maturity issue that I'm dealing with. I think it's time we look at this gap of having to recruit directly from the schools, for young people to get involved. We need to look at people who are experienced. People who have some idea of what life is about. People who may also have been engaged in some other form of employment but they want to serve in constabulary but because of the age gap we cannot bring them back in. I think it is time that the constabulary stop restricting themselves to just simply looking at the age group and saying this is what we want. In 2016 we will be commencing our executive programme. We will be sending our cadets to the joint services college.  This is the government directive where we have an annual one of training with the military at the defence academy.  Then we bring them back to continue with our training at the Bomana college. Also I will be reintroducing what is called Officer Selection Programme for the RPNGC, targeting the generations of police officers that we could not have them on the cadet programme. We put them through this training. We have the Officer Selection Programme running through Bomana. These are officers who are already out in the field, pushing through them under the leadership stream to become commissioned officers of the constabulary.

KV: You believe all this will help discipline and maturity? It's going to take a while though to change a culture that seems to be permeating the force though yeah?

GB:  It's not something that can be done overnight. It needs time. It needs effort, it needs collective effort from everyone. It needs also that our members of the constabulary need to understand that this is the direction we need to place the police force so it can serve the country and its people better.