Guarding detention Staff assigned to detention centres are regular police officers, who have received basic police education.83 As special policing concerns arose in the late 1990s, i.e., rapidly increasing immigration, a specialised policing body was created. Law 2622/1998 established the police division of border guards, with their role limited to preventing the unlawful entry of foreigners to Greece, their detection and arrest (Law 2622/1998). Unlike police officers, who went through four years of police education, this special body was comprised of just high school graduates with no more than four months of training (Rigakos and Papanikolaou, 2003). As the new legislation stipulated, this policing force had to be 90 per cent male. The sexist overtone of the law is explained further below in the document: their mission to prevent foreigners from entering, needs particular physical abilities and body structure.84 While they were uniformed and armed, they could not be promoted and their employment was subject to a five-year renewable contract; thus, in reality they formed a police department with heavy responsibilities but no job security. The lack of security is better exemplified by the fact that in cases of malpractice, whereas police officers could be suspended or dismissed from service, border guards were fired. Before 2009, border guards were a paramilitary force tasked, in particular, with the apprehension and detention of irregular migrants and traffickers. As George Rigakos and Georgios Papanikolaou (2003) point out, their uniform and equipment were closer to that of soldiers. Then they became part of the official police force, with only two weeks extra training. Their gradual incorporation into the police force, created what they called lower status police officers (Christopoulos, 2014). Unsurprisingly, serving at remote locations as a border guard was not very appealing, a situation that often resulted in low staff numbers at border centres. For example, in 2007, official reports suggested that Filakio and Pagani centres had only six officers on duty for 201 and 548 detainees respectively. In need of staff, the police resorted to seconding officers to the borders for one or two months at a time. This is still the case (Rozakou, in preparation). However, the managers of the centres are not happy with the mobility and temporariness of the police officers. As the Director of the Kos pre-removal centre told It should be noted that up until 1994, recruitment of police officers was political and arbitrary. Law 2226/1994 provided for their recruitment through national examinations. For the link, see Law No 2226/1994. 84 For further analysis of this special policing body see Rigakos and Papanikolaou (2003), Vidali (2007) and Christopoulos (2014). 83 129