Mozambican Police Commissioner, Bernardino Rafael, has ordered about 16,000 newly-hired police recruits to undergo retraining less than two months after graduation.
The measure is aimed at improving the recruits’ tactical and operational knowledge. Consequently, the new recruits will undergo a 15-day, three-hour lessons, starting on 17 July.
The retraining is expected to cover all the contents of police training.
Comment
The issue of quantity over quality has always been questioned, with the police training department under fire for valuing quantity.
The 43rd Police Basic Course was the shortest in recent years, lasting less than four months as opposed to the usual six to eight. Apart from being the shortest, it enrolled the largest number of trainees, 16,000, surpassing the 2022 course which graduated 11,000 trainees in three different training police institutions.
This shows that the police top brass preferred to shorten the training period and increased the number of recruits. Police sources say that this recruitment hardly follows a due diligence process to wean out would-be corrupt, criminal and unemployed elements from infiltrating the ranks of the police.
Furthermore, retraining or refreshing courses are necessary when they are designed for refreshing knowledge and when they are new policing approaches to impart, which does not seem to be the case owing to the time period from graduation to retraining. For example, sources say that some of the new recruits hardly know how to fire a gun.
This is another shameful event in Rafael’s stint at the helm of the police but at least he acted quickly to remedy the situation.
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