The Executive Mayor of the City of Johannesburg, Mpho Moerane together with the Member of the Mayoral Committee for Public Safety, Mally Mokoena and MEC for Community Safety Faith Mazibuko had on Wednesday, October 12 hosted the passing out parade for the remaining trainees from the 2017 intake.
1109 Johannesburg Metro Police Department (JMPD) officers who graduated in 2019 were recalled and sent back for training as they were unable to perform some of their duties, such as handling firearms or directing traffic after 18 months of training. The 409 trainees who passed out on Wednesday is the group which couldn’t finish training and never even passed out in 2019 as they had outstanding modules on RTMC programme and were supposed to do skills but the Academy concentrated on the retraining of the 1109 who were sent back.
The Metro Police trainees stood on parade after having successfully completed the intense theoretical and practical Basic Metropolitan Police training. Speaking at the event held at the Johannesburg Expo Centre in Nasrec, Moerane congratulated them and said that they are a group of determined individuals who demonstrated that they do not mind a little delay to graduate just as long as they qualify all legal requirements to become officers.
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“Graduating those who are not ready to graduate, devalues the esteemed uniform and in a long run, erodes the people’s confidence in our law enforcement officials and subsequently the whole metro police department,” said Moerane.
“Never again should we have a situation like we had in 2019 where we paraded, just for cameras when the trainees weren’t ready and legally qualified,” Moerane added.
Moerane was also proud to announce that the graduates are all young people and non of them is over the age of 35.
” This is evidence to show that as the city, we are serious about youth employment, we say to our youth, go and fight crime and we believe that they will be successful” Moerane said.
Moerane said that they are making a commitment to recruit 400 more officers per cycle.