Foreign police officers are not the answer

swer

AN article on page 24 of The National of Friday, Nov 3 in relation to the PM suggesting to recruit foreign police officers mainly from Australia, was spot on.
Foreign police officers are not the answer to PNG’s policing problems and that was.
We haven’t tried our very best as a sovereign state to fix our police force or for that matter, all the three disciplinary forces.
There are many factors to consider in improving policing in PNG.
The police commissioner or other stakeholders need to advise the PM and the police minister to take on board certain recommendations for Parliament’s approval.
The first is local knowledge.
A police officer who understands a local dialect and customs in a locality is an advantage for his or her work but that advantage can be abused to prevent the arrest of a culprit known to them.
So that would mean that transferring policemen and women at intervals of five years is recommended.
Customs and culture are seen to have a bearing on police work for too long.
Charging offending police personnel is only done in NCD and not in other centres or in rural police stations.
Stealing bail money and releasing offenders from cells after collecting bribes are criminal acts but the offending police personnel go scot-free.
Sometimes reports are not done or sent to higher authorities because of threats issued against the commanding officers. So the point is the next offence committed by any policeman or women is mediated using the index of a previous incident.
The powers of the provincial station commander to charge is somewhat diminished.
So this brings into question the job of the station commander, provincial commander and divisional commander.
The creation of the divisional commanders is a waste of police resources compared to the backlog of complaints against police personnel.
We need to abolish the office of divisional commanders and use the funding saved there and from other ineffective police setups to buy police choppers for the four regions.
The primary role of police in any given country is to fight crime and corruption so in PNG there is more work to be done in improving policing.
For instance, the policy on buying back illegal guns has not been piloted as yet.
Leave the AFP and NZFP alone and try to effectively roll out some new recommendations highlighted above first and see how we can manage before looking for bilateral assistance overseas.

Andy Brum
Angenmol-Minj