us, at a monitoring visit I did together with the Greek NPM, the facility had only 65 police officers, 95 percent of whom stay there only for one month. ‘I cannot work with those who have no experience, so I have become a trainer’ (Fieldnotes, Kos detention centre, 2019). This is not only an issue at border locations. According to detention officers I have spoken with during my time as an NGO practitioner, ‘guarding immigrants is not proper police work’ as opposed to fighting crime on the streets of Athens. Therefore, a lot of the staff serving at detention centres in Athens, are not there willingly, they have instead been seconded there from other police departments for limited periods of time. The Director of the Petrou Ralli pre-removal centre put it astutely ‘Nobody wants to work with foreigners…I am a coach with constantly new players and I can’t win the championship.’85 Despite working with vulnerable populations, detention officers do not receive any training on human rights or how to treat detainees, nor on immigration matters. When I asked the manager of the Petrou Ralli detention centre about the training that his detention officers received he said that ‘they get relevant training. I can’t say they are untrained’ (Interview, Petrou Ralli detention centre, 2018). But when I asked for specific details, he could not identify any specific details. When for my PhD I reached out to the training department of the Greek police to find out about the alleged extra training that detention officers go through, they denied access to this information, because ‘the institutional framework that determines the responsibilities of the service does not foresee the provision of such information to outside individuals.’86 Limited staff numbers, though, created further administrative issues that were reflected in the treatment of those behind bars. As a detention officer at the airport detention facility told me, ‘the government puts all these people in here and we suffer too… we are not their servants here. They cannot go to the toilet whenever they want. They are too many, so we will take them only when we can.’ (Fieldnotes, airport detention facility, 2013). This quote reveals the overstretched police force inside detention using a restrictive policy as a means to deal with the challenges they have to face at work, and at the same time avoid responsibility for their actions. This It is difficult to know the number of detention officers throughout the country because there are no statistics but according to the manager at Petrou Ralli, for a capacity of around 300 people, there were 96 officers (including administrative staff) at the time of the interview in 2018. This amounts to 15 officers per 8hr shift. 85 86 Official letter by the training division, No 1728/ 18/2365713. 130