By Jimitota Onoyume
PORT HARCOURT — ALL tiers of government would hence-forth contribute to the funding of the Police.
Chairman, Police Service Commission (PSC), Mr Parry Osayande (DIG rtd), made this known in Port Harcourt, yesterday.

According to him, as part of the radical reform going on in the Police institution, a strategy has been devised that would see that promotion would now be only on merit.

He said the era of what could best be described as long-leg in the system was gone.

Osayande, who said he was in the state to interact with officers and men of the force, assured that by the time the reform in the force was completed, the nation would have a Police institution everybody would be very proud of.

According to him, “As I said before, all governments (federal, states and local) will have their imputs into the funding of the Nigeria Police so that they can reposition the organisation to meet the real challenges.

“Hopefully, we are going to have a well managed police organisation. The 377,000 police in the country will be trained and retrained.

“They already have their basic education. A lot of them are graduates. But we want to train them in the art of policing. We want to retrain them in civility and we want to train them that it is not good to torture suspects; it is against human rights. We also want to teach them the art of respectful policing.

“We have now set out certain standards that were not there. We have put in place promotional mecha-nism where integrity, honesty, hard work, seniority and merit are the yardsticks of promoting any officer from one rank to another, unlike in the past when promotions were made according to the ‘length’ of your legs.

“This time around, you are not going to spend money to get promoted. Once you merit it, have the seniority and done your job well, provided that the vacancies exist, the Police Service Commission will make sure that you are promoted.

“This is the new stand and approach we are taking to reposition the Nigeria Police”