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Training for police recruits cut back

Staff shortages mean quality of instruction could be compromised

By Ondřej Bouda
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
March 12th, 2008 issue

For some months now, Interior Minister Ivan Langer has been rather vocal about his belief in the need for police reform.
“We have the second-largest police force in Europe. There is one commanding officer to every eight policemen,” he wrote in a March 10 article for the daily Právo. “Mostly, however, they work as postal workers, organizers of sports events or insurance company officials. We need a modern police force full of educated men and women ready to serve and protect the citizens.”
But his approach to reaching this goal is causing some concern.
The police force is short 5,041 officers, according to official numbers quoted by the Interior Ministry. In an attempt to fill these posts as quickly as possible, the ministry has begun to shorten the training time for prospective police officers. In the past, candidates had to enroll in a 12-month course, which was divided into one month of entrance training, nine months of theory and two months of practical experience.
As of January, however, that total period has been reduced to nine months, and, if a current ministry plan goes through, the time could be cut to as little as five months by this summer.
“The range of taught subjects would definitely suffer,” said Jiří Veselý, director of a police high school in Holešov, east Moravia. “Police officers would be required to continue their studies while actually on duty in order to reach the same level of qualification as today.”
Other teachers involved in training police went much further, complaining that even the 12-month period was too short.
“This reminds me of the 18th century, when recruiting parties just needed to fill quotas and did everything to maximize the number of recruits,” one anonymous teacher told Právo March 4.
The Interior Ministry did not return a request for comment as of press time.
The planned reform could also allow officers as young as 18 to appear on the streets (currently, officers under the age of 21 are not allowed to drive police vehicles with blue emergency beacons).
As the problem of recruiting continues, there’s no shortage of facilities in which future officers could be working. Langer has been traveling throughout the country opening new police stations. So far, 51 new such facilities have been opened under project P1000 and another 200 are planned by the end of 2008. The price tag should reach 3.5 billion Kč ($212.6 million) by 2010. The ministry admits to spending 6 million Kč on one office in Prague alone.
As part of another effort to save officers doing pointless jobs, Langer has proposed that police be called to car accidents only if the damage exceeds than 250,000 Kč, which is a fivefold increase from the current cutoff.

Ondřej Bouda can be reached at news@praguepost.com


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