Record high number of police officers quit in 2018

Ten years ago, approximately 200 police officers left the departments. Today, this number is ten times more. The main cause is the low salaries and the thus more attractive private sector. 

Not attractive enough

Unsurprisingly, there are not enough applicants who want to become border guards which is a separate unit in the Hungarian police force. In the last eight months, the number of border guard graduates fell to 1/6th, and last Monday, only 22 of them took up service. However, the police do not give up recruiting since they always need new officers because of the high rate of fluctuation – nepszava.hu reported.

Géza Pongó, general secretary of the Independent Police Trade Union, said that before, county police departments sent officers to the border from their staff. However, this process slowed down by now. Today,  graduates fill the position of those who leave the police. The number of Hungarian police staff today is 50 thousand, but only 36 thousand of them are professionals. Therefore, the 2,000 officers who changed their career is astonishingly high and equals the number of police officers providing service in some smaller Hungarian counties. And this wave of demobilisation

affects the border guards as well.

Even though the government decided in 2016 to raise the number of border guards by 3,000, by the fall of 2017, they could find only 1,132 new recruits. This means that they could fill only a third of the positions. Therefore, many police officers were reassigned to the border in order to have enough people providing service near the anti-migration fence built there.

Even paying the rent is problematic for many police officers

The number of new recruits fell significantly: in August there were 124 of them, but in December, their number decreased to only 23. Furthermore, according to data,

10 pc of the applicants cannot finish