According to Pürstl, the problem is that it is relatively difficult to predict the exact annual departures from the police due to retirements. This is due to the relatively large range of when police officers can retire – namely between 60 and 65 years. An example: This year, 430 retirements would have been theoretically possible in the Vienna executive, but 180 were actually completed. “But that also means that they will retire in the coming years.” In total, there are currently around 7,400 law enforcement officers in Vienna .
90 dropouts among police students
Pürstl pointed out that positions as a police officer are not always “jobs for life”. Civil servants would also move to other areas of government service or into the private sector altogether.
Pension privileges, such as civil servants being able to retire with 80 to 100 percent of their last salary, “no longer exist”. Some civil servants who are now retiring are already in the ASVG system, and all of them will be in the near future. You have to expect a certain fluctuation, there were around 60 departures this year. But there were also 90 dropouts among the police students.
Admission process should be faster
The executive is in fierce competition on the job market. “There are currently a lot of vacancies,” explained Pürstl. “A lot of employers are fishing in the same pond.” The job is “incredibly attractive in terms of the task, varied, but on the other hand not without danger and requires a high level of work motivation and work performance – in particular, there is no quiet eight-hour day, there are also night shifts, of course, and overtime.”
You can also earn very well, especially with the Vienna police, on the other hand “the work has to be done”. The willingness of young people to give everything for the service – “just work and less life” – no longer exists, this “balance is shifting more and more in the direction of life, and the police feel that too”.
“We can currently take on as many employees as we want,” said Pürstl. “But we clearly have difficulties filling all classes.” In 2022, fewer than half were admitted to basic training than those “we might have accepted”. As an employer, you have to “be able to offer sweets to other employers”. “We will have to speed up the admissions process,” emphasized Pürstl. It also has to go faster from the application to the test procedure, it has been shown that some have jumped off to other employers during this period.
More flexibility
The chief of police also expects a lot from for the police profession, for example through the new recruiting center in Leopoldstadt, where you can inform interested parties and show them how they feel in a uniform or in protective equipment, or through VR glasses can participate in an operation. “But we also do recruiting outside of the center by means of so-called recruiting days,” added Pürstl. There are also tours in districts and outside of Vienna.
In the next two years it will be important to set up special recruiting measures, to present the police profession as attractive and to make it attractive. “As an employer, we also have to consider whether we can move from the old structures that we traditionally have to modernizing the framework conditions a bit, i.e. in the area of overtime, in the service times, in the rigid service systems that we have, and thus more flexibility create for the employees,” said Pürstl.
An example: You have commissioned work packages. “I told my employees to think ‘out of the box’,” explained the chief of police wants to provide additional service when, that the employees are also given guarantees for days when they are not deployed”. Pürstl hopes that this will result in proposals that are worth discussing in the first half of 2023, so that the feasibility can then be checked and the ideas can ultimately be discussed with the staff representatives can.
Admission criteria should not be lowered
In Pürstl’s opinion, the initiative propagated around ten years ago and before that to get more people with a migration background to join the police has not “gone into the background, but has now become a matter of course”.
Pürstl denied that the criteria for entering the police service had been lowered. “If the number of applicants decreases overall and fewer come to the selection process and tests, then it is also clear that there are some among them who are not in the top field in terms of performance.” However, the range has not changed.
He also sees no need to lower the bandwidth. There are barriers that you can’t go under. “A certain level of education is required in order to gain a foothold in the public service, and that is particularly important in the police profession.”
