By continuing to select candidates for the “police crash-course” the state administration invests in personnel that are not needed and for whom there is no information as to how and when will be employed, due to the fact that several cohorts of cadets still await employment in Police.
During 10 and 11 September, a health check-up was conducted for 270 candidates who had previously met criteria to attend the Ministry of Interior’s training for work in the Police, out of whom 60 will be selected for the course. In addition to this, the Police Academy takes in generations of cadets whose education costs amount to 15.000 EUR per person.
The above mentioned three-months long training of the Ministry of Interior goes against all Government’s decisions and has begun a year ago (19 September 2017) by announcing a public call for the potential trainees.
At that time, think-tank from Montenegro Institute Alternative pointed to the fact that this call goes against all strategic documents and guidelines that the Government adopted on the Ministry of Interior’s initiative. Specifically, Government’s documents (Police Directorate Development Strategy, Action Plan for its implementation and the Analysis of the Status, Reception, Promotion, Education and Training of Police Officers) all point to the surplus of employees in Police, as well as to the lack of need to offer employment to those whose education is lower than the Police Academy.
These documents stipulate that there is a need to change the legislation and prescribe that having received education from the Police Academy is the lowest qualification for employment, which is an acceptable level of education for the Ministry of Interior.
Since the announcement of the call and up until September 2018, the applicants have been waiting for the selection procedure to resume. To add insult to the injury, in the meantime the Government’s decision to forbid employment based both on fixed- and long-term contracts in all organizational units of state administration and public institutions until 1 July 2019 entered into force, as per the Plan for Optimization of State Administration.
As an exception to these rules from the Optimization Plan, 31 cadets of the VIII generation have already been employed in the Police after a special Information from the Ministry of Interior had been sent to the Government in July this year, without a public call. In the same month, the next generation XII of the Police Academy also commenced its training. This means that during the next two years there will be four generations of almost 200 cadets ready to be employed in the Ministry of Interior based on automatism and without public calls, in line with the new clauses from the Draft Law on Internal Affairs.
However, these new legislative solutions proposed by the Ministry of Interior did not only envisage automatic employment for cadets but they also forbid the employment of persons who have received education lower than the Police Academy. Due to everything aforementioned, it remains unclear why the Police trains cadres that will not have the opportunity to use the knowledge they received because they will not fulfill the criteria to be employed by the police.
Finally, with the announced changes to the Law on Pension and Disability Insurance of Montenegro, the beneficiary work experience of police officers will no longer exist. This means that the natural “outflow” of personnel will slow down and that in a multiannual perspective there will not be as many vacancies as there will be trained personnel.
The Institute Alternative invite the Ministry of Interior to take their own strategic documents more seriously and to implement policies that could help the Police to function more effectively and have the best personnel, which is something that will not be achieved by having “crash-courses.”
Dina Bajramspahic,
Public Policy Researcher
