Wasting no opportunity, Faro’s new PSP district commander Ricardo van Zeller Matos took advantage of the forces’ 87th anniversary on Thursday to ask for “more agents, more cars and better working conditions”.
Weeks into his new brief, the 46-year-old told his national director Luís Farinha that PSP top brass had actually succeeded in bringing down the number of crimes when they were more often than not working two ‘jobs’ at once.
“There are officers leading nuclei that also have to command operational units,” he explained.
“These are two jobs, with just one salary, and a lot of difficulties combining the two.”
As national tabloid Correio da Manhã explained, this was “just one of the alerts” sounded as Farinha led the commemorations of the public security force.
Elsewhere, problems centred on the state of police vehicles and maintenance of IT equipment.
Matos, meantime, revealed that over the past two years, violent crime in the Algarve has seen a drop of 19%.
