In Russia, police solve crimes, commit them

Russian police officers are party to corruption, rape and murder. President Medvedev has now announced he will purge their ranks. But will it be enough?

At 31 years of age, Sasja is a very young retiree. A year ago, he was relieved to trade in his smart uniform for a comfortable sweater. Instead of a patrol car he now drives an old Lada, earning a little money as a cab driver. Sasja is happy. His former life as a police officer was hell for him. “I am so happy I have been freed from my colleagues’ terror,” he said. “I suffered under it for 12 years. If you don’t play along you are beaten and teased.”

Endemic corruption

Playing along. That is what the Russian police is all about. Playing along in a system that is corrupted across the board and throughout the ranks. A system only able to survive in the anarchy that has taken hold of the Russian state since the fall of communism. “We didn’t get to keep the money we collected every day,” Sasja recalled. “At the end of our shift we handed it over to our superiors who then redistributed it, depending on our ranks. I refused to participate and for that I was branded a traitor. They did everything they could to make my life hell. As soon as I was able to retire, I left.”

The police has a very bad reputation in Russia. Opinion polls show that two out of three Russians do not trust the police one bit. Unlike in the West, where the police protect citizens, in Russia they are their greatest enemy.

Russian police officers are criminally active on a massive scale. The Russian edition of Esquire kept a log of all the crimes they committed in the second half of 2009. The listing showed that over that time frame, innocent civilians were killed, raped and extorted by police officers on a daily basis.

The high level of work-related stress police officers experience makes matters even worse. Last summer, a burned-out police major went on a shooting spree in a Moscow supermarket, killing two innocent civilians and wounding seven. In Tomsk, an overworked police officer with a troubled private life recently beat a journalist to death in a holding cell, after he had been arrested for disturbing the peace.

At the moment there are 15,000 cases against corrupt officers still in court, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. The cause of the corruption is simple, Sasja said. “The salaries are so low that even an honest officer needs to take bribes just to get by.”

Earlier this year, in response to another outburst of law enforcement violence, president Dmitry Medvedev decided to instigate a crackdown. At the home affairs chief police department, 10,000 troopers are currently being sacked, amounting to half the entire staff. Medvedev has also replaced a number of deputy ministers with members of his personal staff and fired dozens of officers from the upper echelons of the police. Rashid Nurgaliyev, Russia’s minister of home affairs, wants to reduce the number of officers by 20 percent, and has been given a month’s time to fight police misconduct and attract better recruits. “This will allow us to raise salaries and create normal working conditions,” he said late last year.

12,000 euros a month in bribes

The average Moscow police officer currently earns approximately 20,000 Russian rubles a month (490 euros), which is barely enough to rent a single-room apartment . “But working for the traffic police he might collect an average of 500,000 rubles (12,000 euros) a month in bribes,” Sasja said. “No pay raise will ever be able to compete with that amount.” Sasja did not hold high hopes for the bonus system which would reward officers for solving crimes. “The police will start making up crimes to get more money,” he said.

Political scientist Nikolay Petrov of the think tank Carnegie Moscow Centre also thought little good would come from the reforms president Medvedev had announced. “In 2002 the ministry of home affairs also saw massive layoffs,” he said. “Then, too, police generals were fired. But large reductions in staff do not mean real reform is in the works.”

According to Petrov, the layoffs announced have little to do with the notorious scandals of last year, which claimed the lives of innocent civilians.

Petrov is sure that after the purge, the system will remain unchanged. “Those laid off were not necessarily the worst at the home affairs ministry. And those rehired not necessarily the best. The problems with the police have little to do with the sacking of dozens of generals, they are tied to the state’s general dysfunction. The police are only drawing so much attention at the moment because the average Russian encounters them so often in everyday life,” Petrov said.

The inefficient machinery of state, controlled by competing interest groups, only continues to exist because Russia is not a democracy with a parliament that safeguards the functioning of government, Petrov said.

“To change the police fundamentally, systemic reform is required, not populist gestures or superficial measures.”

A young police officer showed off his new BMW 7-series to colleagues on Taganka square in the centre of Moscow. Some were obviously impressed, others had a hard time hiding their indignation. “He would never be able to afford that car on his salary alone,” one of them whispered to his comrade.