Russia's police are out of control

This week’s Economist includes an interesting piece on the corruption and brutality of the Russian police and the increasing media attention it is garnering in the Russian press. The country’s police force has long been lamented by Russians who see it at best as the brutal enforcement arm of government, and at worst as a criminal organisation run to skim the profits from Russia’s economic revival. My own experience has only served to further this impression.

On first landing in Domodedovo airport during a particularly brutal snowstorm I was greeted by a friendly taxi driver who hastened me to his car before speeding off down ice-caked roads. On the way we passed a police patrol car which, thankfully, had pulled over the driver in front of us while we continued rocketing our way into Moscow. I asked the driver whether he was worried about being caught by the police. He told me if I paid them about 1000 roubles (roughly £20) it wouldn’t be a problem.

“At least now,” he said, “they only ask for bribes when you’ve done something wrong.”



For a disenchanted populace this is a sign of progress. People are used to the police pulling over expensive-looking (and especially western) cars and demanding payment for some fictional misdemeanour. But if it is the sign of tentative reform it is hardly something worth getting excited about. My taxi driver, however, had hit on a fundamental problem that was curtailing the push for reform: the passive acceptance of the majority. This insipid code of silence is one that has been almost hard-wired into the Russian psyche following brutal government repression and the massive social upheavals of their recent collective history. Few Russians have benefited from sticking their head up above the parapet.

On another occasion, my employers were attempting to arrange a business conference in St. Petersburg and were told quite openly that they could have a police escort from the airport to the hotel–for a nominal fee, of course. If they were feeling particularly adventurous they could also arrange for a fake kidnapping to take place, complete with masked men armed with AK-47s leaping out of 4x4s. The flagrant and largely accepted abuses of the system were so many and so obvious that they gained the status of an unquestionable status quo. The press were uninterested–after all, it wasn’t news to most–and the government was seemingly incapable of confronting the powerful force of the Federal Security Service (FSB), whose talons run deep both in  the force and the upper echelons of the Kremlin.

Despite this, recent reports suggest that frustration with the abuses of police power has started to boil over. One catalyst for this was the outpouring of anger in April last year following the news that Denis Yevsyukov, a Moscow police major, had gone on a shooting spree in a supermarket resulting in the death of two people. Indeed, official statistics show that police committed more than 5,000 crimes in 2009, an increase of 11% over the 2008 figure.

Such is the concern of the interior ministry that it has begun a nationwide public relations campaign to try and regain faith in the police. The hope is that by showing posters of acts of heroism by respectable policemen they can demonstrate a more palatable side of the force. More seriously, at the start of the month President Dmitry Medvedev reiterated his commitment to a police reform plan which has already seen the sacking of 18 interior ministry officials. The plans also includes cutting total numbers of police by 20% across the country to try to make the system more manageable and help the authorities clamp down on the culture of corruption.

If these measures are to prove successful, public pressure will have to be continued. As with broader reforms of the justice system, progress on key issues can slow or stop altogether once they have fallen out of the spotlight. With presidential elections now only two years away, however, there is good reason for Medvedev to start building an election platform for himself through his reforms.