More foreigners to serve among Czech police - press

More members of ethnic minorities are to serve among Czech police, the daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) writes today in connection with the new national strategy for relations between the police and minorities that the Czech government approved on Wednesday.

The national strategy aims at a markedly broader engagement of foreigners in police work, the paper recalls.

The police secondary school in Holesov, south Moravia, specialises in the project of a multicultural police and it wants to enrol 30 foreigners who will form up to one-third of the class.

Some 50 representatives of ethnic minorities will take the school’s entry exams to be held in ten days. Most of them are Romanies and Vietnamese, but also a Mongolian boy, an Afghan girl and several Slovaks and Poles will try to succeed in the exams, the paper writes.

"These students can work for the foreigner police as interpreters, for example," the school’s deputy head Andrej Rohal told MfD.

To be allowed to study, the youths need to have Czech citizenship or apply for it.

No official data on the number of foreigners among the Czech police are available. "We have had two or three foreigners among the 90 new students every year so far," Rohal said.

Police with a foreign background can be useful not only as an interpreter, but members of their community would trust them more and disclose information on crime to them, the paper writes.

A Czech policeman has problems to recognise faces of Asian citizens and to remember their names, MfD says.

The government strategy also plans to increase the number of assistants mediating contact between the police and inhabitants of Romany ghettoes.

These mediators already operate in five Czech districts. They for example help file criminal complaints against usurers, to whom ghetto inhabitants often fell victim, and they accompany Romanies to police stations, MfD writes.