Riga struggles with severe shortage of police officers

RIGA, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- The Latvian capital of Riga has been grappling with severe shortages of law enforcement officers, with nearly one in every five Riga-based positions at the Latvian State Police being vacant at the moment, the Baltic country's public television has reported.

Although the state police has problems manning its stations across Latvia, the problem in Riga is especially serious, and the number of job vacancies keeps growing, said the report on Sunday.

Out of the approximately 800 vacant police jobs, 500 have been reported in Riga, public TV said citing publicly available data.

The job vacancy rate at the Riga regional police department has increased from 12 percent in 2012 to 17 percent this year. Across Latvia, the rate of vacancies at the Latvian State Police is 11.4 percent this year.

Each investigator working in the eastern Latvian region of Latgale, where there are no vacant police jobs, handles around 130 criminal cases, whereas in Riga and the western Latvian region of Kurzeme, each police officer simultaneously conducts 500 investigations.

Latvian Prosecutor General Eriks Kalnmeiers said that the situation is affecting the quality of investigations.

"The shortage of officers increases the existing investigators' workload. If an investigator who has been in charge of 200 cases quits his job, these cases have to distributed among the remaining employees," Kalnmeiers said, admitting that capacity is a pressing issue for the Latvian State Police.

Police representatives said that around 900 people apply for the vacant police jobs a year, but not all of them pass the selection process, which includes a physical fitness test among other things. The youngsters fit for the service are also in high demand on the labor market and many of them opt for enlisting in the armed forces where salaries are higher than in the law enforcement service. Enditem