Police training project ignored

By Lulamile Feni

BISHO -- Human rights and diversity projects to bring about effective policing are moving at a snail's pace due to a lack of management support from police station commissioners.

Bisho Training College commander Captain Hintsa Swartbooi, who is co-ordinating the projects in the East London and Grahamstown areas, said the projects had only workshopped 70 members, 20 from Grahamstown and 50 from the East London area.

"If the stations had responded, we would have trained or workshopped a lot of functional members, but managers seem to have ignored the project," Swartbooi said.

He said there were 3616 functional police members in the area who were supposed be workshopped from November 1999 to April 2001, but he feared that half that number would not be workshopped.

Twenty five trainers in the East London area were supposed to have already been identified but so far only three people have been identified and the Grahamstown area has identified only two.

The diversity project co-ordinator in the East London area, Inspector Phumla Push Peteni, was disappointed about the slow progress of the project and blamed ignorance and negative attitudes of station managers.

Peteni said out of the 3286 people in the police service in the East London area, which she had to workshop, only 171 people had attended.

"Commanders seemed to be in the dark about this project, a project that creates a conducive working environment of respect and understanding of one ano-ther's culture," she said. She said black police members still feel inferior about working with white members and whites feel superior, and that those were the issues that were supposed to be dealt with.