STAKEHOLDER PARTNERSHIP VITAL FOR RSIPF IN 2016

Stakeholder partnerships will be an important focus for the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force (RSIPF) this year.

Commissioner of Police, Frank Prendergast told his weekly media conference at the RSIPF Aola base in Honiara.

He says fostering partnerships with stakeholders in crime prevention will be an important focus for RSIPF this year.

“Particularly in the crime prevention approach, I think you’ve seen some reporting about how we’re trying to build partnerships with the chiefs, you know, that’s what we mean by stakeholder engagement, but that will be a very important focus this year and that was really the main theme of discussion at the conference, so it was a good conference and they’re no magic wonders as I’ve said before, this requires a lot of hard work we had everyone leave the conference committed to doing the hard work.”

SIBC News understands, RSIPF is currently embarking on a crime prevention policing model involving communities in the country.

Meanwhile, on police housing, Mr. Prendergast suggested, two ways to deal with police housing problems is to work out infrastructure plans and policy settings for housing entitlements.

While he acknowledged that housing is an ongoing problem for the police, Mr Prendergast said there are two strategic ways to deal with the housing issue.

“I think the strategic way you deal with it is to work through two things. One is the infrastructure plan so that when you’re putting new police posts out that there’s sufficient housing in that vicinity to support the police officer and then you need to be working on the policy settings, about entitlements and finding different ways to, you know, provide that housing entitlement to officers in a way that they have adequate housing but it doesn’t really continue to put the same amount of pressure on the police budget.”