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Renatas Požėla, Commissioner General of Police. Photo by Darius Janutis (LRVK).
Police, bearing the additional burden of handling a coronavirus pandemic, currently lack 1,400 employees, which means they have to work overtime, says Commissioner General Renatas Požėla.
“The objective situation in the police organization is such that according to the officially approved charging methodology, we currently lack about 1,400 charges, more precisely, living people,” said the general commissioner at a press conference.
According to him, efforts will be made to reduce this deficiency as much as possible this year, but so far, the entire police community has been mobilized due to the additional functions needed to carry out movement control and ensure compliance with other quarantine restrictions.
“Work is organized by planning both overtime pay and overtime work,” said R. Požėla.
According to the Commissioner-General, these shortcomings were due to “certain prior decisions” when attempts were made to increase the salaries of civil servants according to the workload.
“These are decisions that have been inherited, which I saw when I came to this position,” Požėla said.
According to him, this year the goal will be to hire 200 agents: prevention workers, community officials and investigators from the criminal police.
“Everything fell apart and the underpaid officers left and, as I said, there were reorganizations at various points, when the number of police officers was reduced, perhaps to intensify the activities of the remaining employees so that they could receive higher salaries. (…) I and my team have a very clear vision that at least some of those positions need to be reinstated (…) and this year, if something like this does not happen, we will begin to realize it ”, promised the Commissioner General .
The then police leadership undertook reforms in 2016, saying it would increase public safety, the number of patrol policemen and improve working conditions for officers. By merging the public and criminal police in the police stations, part of the buildings and guards were abandoned, thus reducing the number of officers working in the offices. This reform has been criticized by the unions.
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