Police officers have been told to wear t-shirts, not to man barriers at village feasts, and stop reading e-mails after work, in new directives issued on Thursday.  

In a statement, the Malta Police Union said it had registered an industrial dispute over a new policy which it says caps the amount of overtime officers can claim.  

The new policy, enforced by the police leadership, sets a limit on the amount of overtime and extra duty on payment a member of the force can work.

This, the union said, was happening when the force was experiencing "total demotivation", with an exodus of officers and increased stress for those remaining at work.  

They claimed 300 officers had left the force in the past 18 months. 

According to figures tabled in parliament earlier this month, some 117 officers hung up their uniforms before reaching retirement age between 2017 and May of this year. 

These included officers that had been transferred to other departments, were fired or had died.

What do the directives say?

The directives urge officers to wear their police-issued baseball cap and t-shirt for all duties (except court and tribunals), together with their police identification tag.

They are not to perform fixed duties with barriers during feasts and events and are to only accept reports on happenings in their district.

When called by “professional standards” - a body which looks into disciplinary cases - they are not to reply to any questions, either directly or indirectly.

Officers are to no longer submit what are known as statements of facts, except when this is to be entered into the official report database as part of an investigation.  They are being directed to not collect any applications from servizz.gov. 

They are also not to charge any police-issued equipment, such as mobile phones, radios, or torches, at home.

When officers end a shift, they are to activate the "out of office" reply and have been urged not to check e-mails and Facebook messages when not on active duty or when not paid overtime to do so.

They are also not to check any system which accepts online reports or enter any reports received via e-mail or any other system. 

And finally, they have been told to ignore any tickets/charges quota requests by their superiors.

The statement said that members of the police force were "not robots" that could be "managed by an excel sheet". 

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