The Economist: Cops for hire

March 19, 2010

Reform­ing Russia’s vio­lent and cor­rupt police will not be easy

THEY shoot, beat and tor­ture civil­ians, con­fis­cate busi­ness­es and take hostages. They are feared and dis­trust­ed by two-thirds of the coun­try. But they are not for­eign occu­piers, mer­ce­nar­ies or mafia; they are Russia’s police offi­cers. The few decent cops among them are seen as mould-break­ing heroes and dissidents.

Dai­ly reports of police vio­lence read like wartime bul­letins. Recent cas­es include a ran­dom shoot­ing by a police offi­cer in a Moscow super­mar­ket (sev­en wound­ed, two dead), the grue­some tor­ture and killing of a jour­nal­ist in Tom­sk, and the case of Sergei Mag­nit­sky, a young lawyer for an Amer­i­can invest­ment fund. He was denied med­ical treat­ment and died in pre-tri­al deten­tion in Moscow hav­ing accused sev­er­al police offi­cers of fraud.

Police vio­lence is not new in Rus­sia, but a recent wave of pub­lic­i­ty is. A sim­ple expla­na­tion is that police law­less­ness has exhaust­ed people’s patience and that pent-up anger has final­ly burst into news­pa­pers, web­sites and even state tele­vi­sion. The inter­net makes it hard­er to hush things up. Ear­li­er this month a Moscow motorist post­ed a video online alleg­ing that he and sev­er­al oth­er dri­vers were used as human shields by traf­fic police try­ing to catch an armed criminal.

Dmit­ry Medvedev, Russia’s web-aware pres­i­dent, has been quick to respond. He has fired Moscow’s police chief, ordered an over­haul of Russia’s arcane gulag sys­tem and called for reform of the inte­ri­or min­istry. Yet this reform involves cut­ting police num­bers by 20% and cen­tral­is­ing con­trol over region­al police.

Ordi­nary police­men, many of whom despise their own ser­vice, seem baf­fled and angered — not by the claims of abuse, which almost no one dis­putes, but by the hypocrisy of their boss­es, who have turned them into scape­goats. Some have start­ed to spill the beans on their superiors.

The rot has now set in so deep that real reform of Russ­ian polic­ing would mean reform of state pow­er, says Sergei Kanev, a crime reporter for Novaya Gaze­ta. The main func­tion of law-enforce­ment agen­cies in Rus­sia is not to pro­tect the pub­lic from crime and cor­rup­tion, but to shield the bureau­cra­cy, includ­ing them­selves, from the public.

To ensure loy­al­ty the sys­tem allows police and secu­ri­ty ser­vices to make mon­ey from their licence for vio­lence. Police escorts can be offi­cial­ly pur­chased. Oth­er com­mer­cial activ­i­ties include charg­ing for prop­er inves­ti­ga­tion, extor­tion, sell­ing sen­si­tive data­bas­es, tap­ping phones or raid­ing busi­ness­es for com­peti­tors. Many police offi­cers have their own pri­vate busi­ness on the side. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, top jobs in the police are a valu­able, and trad­ed, com­mod­i­ty. Most new recruits sign up to make mon­ey, accord­ing to inter­nal ques­tion­naires. As Mikhail Khodor­kovsky, a busi­ness­man serv­ing an eight-year prison sen­tence on trumped-up charges, has writ­ten, the police, pros­e­cu­tion and prison ser­vices are com­po­nent parts of an indus­try whose busi­ness is legit­imised vio­lence and which uses peo­ple as raw material.

Yet even as thou­sands of busi­ness­men lose their liveli­hoods or serve time on bogus charges, bureau­crats guilty of real crimes are escap­ing light­ly. In recent days a police offi­cer who mur­dered an inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ist in Ingushetia was put under house arrest after the court decid­ed that his two-year penal-colony sen­tence was over­ly harsh. Sev­en time zones to the east, a cus­toms offi­cial found guilty of trad­ing in con­tra­band was giv­en a sus­pend­ed three-year sentence.

Ulti­mate­ly, the police are instru­ments in the hands of a more pow­er­ful insti­tu­tion: the Fed­er­al Secu­ri­ty Ser­vice (FSB), suc­ces­sor to the KGB, which remains out­side pub­lic con­trol and above crit­i­cism. The Russ­ian police ser­vice is not only head­ed by a for­mer FSB oper­a­tive but is packed with its peo­ple, says Vladimir Pas­tukhov of the Russ­ian Insti­tute of Law and Pub­lic Pol­i­cy, a think-tank. The FSB can dab­ble in any busi­ness it likes, but relies on the police to do the foot­work. Seri­ous police reform is there­fore impos­si­ble if the mas­ters are left alone.

The FSB, a fac­tion­al body with its own vest­ed inter­ests, has a near-monop­oly on the repres­sive func­tions of the state. More wor­ry­ing­ly, it relies on its tra­di­tion­al links to organ­ised crime. Mr Kanev, who has inves­ti­gat­ed some of the most high-pro­file kid­nap­pings of wealthy busi­ness­men and their rel­a­tives, says few of them could take place with­out the knowl­edge and even col­lu­sion of for­mer and cur­rent mem­bers of the secu­ri­ty services.

Com­mer­cial kid­nap­pings — once the pre­rog­a­tive of Chech­nya — are now big busi­ness in Moscow. Many cas­es, says Mr Kanev, nev­er get report­ed; instead, the vic­tim qui­et­ly pays up. This is what peo­ple in occu­pied ter­ri­to­ries do.

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