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AKARTA: Indonesian Police Watch (IPW) believes that police recruitment and training are to blame for the numerous cases of police brutality carried out against civilians.

“Acts of arrogance and repression by the police are related to the institution’s poor recruitment system and basic police training in this country,” IPW chairman Neta S. Pane said in a press release on Wednesday as quoted by tribunnews.com.

He pointed out that within the first 15 days of 2012 alone, four civilians had already been shot by police officers. The IPW’s records also show that in 2011, a total of 98 people were shot by police, 18 of whom ended up dying from their wounds.

Neta said that new police recruits only received three months’ training at the State Police School (SPN), which he said was far too little time to prepare officers for their job.

“Even a beauty-salon course takes six months. This means that the National Police training system is worse than the training in beauty salons,” he said.

The police, therefore, had developed a tendency to behave arrogantly and overcompensate for their lack of professionalism and low intellectual competence, he said.

Neta said he hoped for a better police training system, which would improve officers’ intellectual abilities, social awareness and anticorruption mentality.