Rarotonga police station Photo: RNZI / Mary Baines
Cook Islands police are struggling with a personnel shortage due to "remuneration levels" and a lack of opportunities for career advancement within the force.
Police spokesperson Trevor Pitt told RNZ Pacific that they were in need of between 30 and 40 staff.
"[The personnel shortage] predicament has afflicted the police for some time," he said.
"We have experienced some drainage from the personnel, and this has largely been due to the remuneration levels within the police and the prolonged delays in advancing the staff upward through the rankings."
Prime Minister Mark Brown told Cook Islands News that a supplementary budget is to be tabled in parliament next month and will include money to go towards improving the police force.
Pitt said the police service is a unique institution within the Crown agency's scope of responsibilities.
"It is the only organisation that is a ranked it has a ranked personnel who have to be moved and advanced progressively upwards in order to make way for those coming in at the recruitment intake levels."
Cook Islands police have been experiencing a lot of blockages and vacancies at mid-level range for some years now, he said.
"These are staff members in specialized positions which cannot be easily replaced.
"There has been quite a lot of reassigning within the police service itself to cover shortages and various tasking that have been affected over the years."
He said the force is hoping to recruit at least 20 personnel to cover frontline policing shortages and its maritime division, which has been at a critical level for some time.
"That area, in particular, requires a minimum number of seamen to man the patrol boat in international waters.
"We are having to try and sustain levels to meet those demands, as well as frontline policing, which has been reduced by just over 50 percent in that division alone."
Asked if the safety of the public was at risk, Pitt said they were doing "a very excellent job" to meet the policing demands in the country.
"We just came through a festive period in which we were helped greatly by community volunteers and a number of people came forward to assist police officers, especially in the road environment monitoring and traffic enforcement checks throughout the two-week festive period.
He said the Cook Islands police was fortunate that they had the assistance from the community to keep incidents down on the road.
"But generally speaking, the crime figures, we found being the normal run of the mill as they would happen anyway. We have been able to address those with the staff that we have.
"The difficulty is reassigning staff who may be occupied in other positions and having to drag them across to cover.
"But it is obviously a situation that cannot be sustained over a longer period of time.
We will need to get numbers out there, and we will also need to be adequately resourced in terms of budget."
The starting wage for people in the police force is the minimum wage, which is $9.50 an hour.
Pitt said it has been difficult for the police for a number of reasons, not just the salary level.
"Because of the realities of the job market today, where a lot of our young people are leaving to work overseas, either in New Zealand or Australia, which obviously pay a much higher minimum wage than we do here.
"The police is having to deal with market influences. Unfortunately, we have not been able to compete with Crown agencies, which have taken a great deal of our staff.
"It is one area that's requiring a lot of review and analysis, and obviously some changes need to be made to ensure that new police officers coming into the job are not put at a disadvantage."
