Lawmaker wants police to focus on quality not quantity

A lawmaker says the National Police should ask for more money in next year’s budget to improve the quality of existing officers instead of looking to hire more recruits.

“The police will have more personnel who lack the capacity to carry out their duties. In other words, we can’t expect much from them in years to come,” Eva Kusuma Sundari, a legislator on House Commission III overseeing legal affairs, told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.

Eva said that the police needed capacity-building programs. “It is just doesn’t make sense to me that they prefer only to increase their personnel numbers.”

The National Police are asking that their budget for 2103 be increased Rp 9 trillion over this year’s Rp 28.3 trillion allocation.

Contacted separately, National Police spokesman Insp. Gen. Saud Usman Nasution said that the 300,000 officers currently deployed by the police across the nation were not enough.

Nasution cited the example of the riot in Bima, West Nusa Tenggara, on Thursday, when the number of officers deployed from three police districts were outnumbered by the crowd that burned down the office of Bima’s regent.

“We must set our priorities properly. Recruiting more personnel will be on top of our agenda. Of course, we will not ignore capacity-building programs in our curriculum,” Nasution said.