HÀ NỘI — The police chief’s position in Hà Nội’s communes will be assigned to professional police officers instead of semi-professional ones, Hà Nội People’s Committee chairman Nguyễn Đức Chung said on Tuesday.

Speaking at a meeting in Hà Nội, Chung said the city would conduct a pilot project in which professional police officers would take responsibility of police chiefs of communes that have complex social and security issues.

He said he would assign the Hà Nội Police Department and Department of International Affairs to map out essential steps of the project, and chairmen of districts’ People’s Committees to decide to whom to assign the positions.  

Chung said this would not be a drastic change but a step-by-step effort to improve social order in rural communes.

“We will not replace all commune-level police positions with professional ones, only the chief and deputy chief positions, depending on different localities. This change will only apply to communes that lack a police chief or whose chief police officers have retired,” Chung said.

Commune-level police officers in Việt Nam are considered semi-professional as they do not have to pass high school or receive police training.

The idea of “formalising” the commune-level armed forces was first proposed at a meeting of the National Assembly Standing Committee in 2015 to improve the complex security problems affecting rural areas in the country.

At the end of 2017, two professional police officers were assigned the positions of police chief and deputy police chief of Đồng Tâm Commune in Hà Nội’s Mỹ Đức District, marking the city’s first effort to raise the bar for commune-level police. All 386 communes in the city are expected to have professional chief police officers by 2020. — VNS