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10.08.10
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Cop Shop Makeover
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By Tom Balmforth
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The new draft bill to overhaul Russia’s infamously corrupt police force was posted online for public discussion as planned on Saturday, and has since received thousands of comments. Among the proposals, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev wants to rebrand the police force with its tsarist name – “politsiya,” and abolish its now notorious Soviet name of “militsiya.” Medvedev is serious about the battle to beat Russia’s most loathed ministry into shape, but critics and analysts alike say it will take much more than legislation.
President Dmitry Medvedev’s draft bill “On Police,” which will replace the 1991 law “On Militsiya,” was aired online for public discussion on Saturday. The 57-article overhaul of Russia’s embattled Interior Ministry is almost double the size of its predecessor, and includes an additional 14 articles.
On Friday the Russian president met with Sergei Naryshkin, the chief of staff in the Presidential Administration, Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of the Security Council, and Rashid Nurgaliyev, the head of the Interior Ministry, to discuss his long-awaited police shake-up designed to stamp out rampant corruption. He announced that it would be posted online in the first step toward making police more accountable to the public.
"This is the first time we are submitting a draft law for such broad public discussion. This draft law concerns all of our citizens because we all have dealings with the police," president Medvedev said. The document posted on August 7 has so far attracted thousands of comments on its Russian domain “.??” – zakonoproekt.ru. “If the experiment in discussing this draft law proves successful, and I hope it will be, we will use it in the future with other laws, which are important for our people and society," Medvedev said.
“With all the nuances that need to be discussed, it’s great that Medvedev has put the draft up for discussion. We can see that many people have commented, and even policemen are commenting,” said Kiril Kabanov, the head of the non-governmental National Anti-Corruption Council.
Rebranding
The most eye-catching proposal is the renaming of the Interior Ministry. The police force, Medvedev said Friday, will revert to its tsarist name, “politsiya,” as it was known when Peter the Great originally founded it in 1718 in St. Petersburg, while the current name “militsiya,” coined by the Bolsheviks in 1917, will be scrapped.
Few Russians contest the police force’s tarnished image. In March this year, some 70 percent of Russians said they did not trust the police force, a Levada Center poll found. And as many as 22 percent of Russians actually sympathized with vigilante groups who killed several policeman earlier this year, according to a Levada poll carried out June 30.
But experts are skeptical that rebranding the police will have any impact on its image, or the police force itself. “It doesn’t change anything,” said Sergei Mikheev, the vice-president of the Center for Political Technologies. “In the end, changing the name from ‘militsiya’ to ‘politsiya’ isn’t going to do a thing. They changed ‘GAI’ to ‘GIBDD’, and that didn’t. The people remain the same.” The proposal has also come under fire for its huge projected cost. The Kommersant news daily estimated it would cost billions of rubles to reprint “politsiya” on all the necessary signs, police cars, and attestation forms and certificates across the whole of Russia.
Nonetheless the newly proposed legislative base itself is encouraging and shows efforts to increase police accountability. “The fact is that the principles which Medvedev has proposed in the draft law are very correct, said Kabanov, adding that it does have several flaws. The notion of public control over the police, supposedly enshrined in the draft, is problematic, said Kabanov. “It’s written in the draft law that the basis for evaluating the activities of the police force is through public assessment, but it is completely unclear how such a mechanism of ‘public evaluation’ would work.”
“I [also] didn’t see a definition of the ‘honor and dignity’ of citizens in this draft. I didn’t see police accountability for debasing human ‘honor and dignity’,” he said. “And besides the draft, we need to change the actual attitude of the police – to change the essence of the police.”
New name, same police
Mikheev agreed that the problem with Russia’s notoriously corrupt Interior Ministry was not one of legislation. “Solving the problem with personnel through a draft bill is not simple. There are not enough personnel who are prepared to just work as policemen without using it as a source of corrupt money,” he said.
Medvedev yesterday continued his string of Interior Ministry reshuffles, as he appointed Mikhail Velichko, the current deputy head of its administrative department, as an adviser to Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev. Medvedev hopes to cut the police force by between 20 and 25 percent, and raise salaries so that the police force works more “effectively, honestly and cohesively,” Medvedev said at the end of last week. “It is possible to reform the Interior Ministry, but it’s going to take a new generation of policemen – with the people working there at the moment, it’s practically impossible. For twenty years, these people have been shown that the most important thing is their pocket,” said Mikheev.
Russia’s infamous police force has limped from scandal to scandal since April 2009, when a police officer went on a shooting spree and killed two, leaving seven wounded. Last week two major police scandals hit the headlines. On July 31, Noize MC, a Russian rapper famed for his blistering attacks on corrupt officials, performed one of his signature tunes at a concert in Volgograd, and was locked up for ten days on charges of “hooliganism.” On Thursday, the rapper whose real name is Ivan Alexeev, publically apologized to his captors in rap couplets, although it was unclear how serious he was when he called Russia’s notorious cells a “paradise” where it was “impossible not to repent.”
The police have been accused of being involved in a battle between ecologists and the powerful backers of a new road from St. Petersburg to Moscow, which will dissect the Khimki forest and therefore destroy a large part of the thousand hectare reserve just north of Moscow. In the past fortnight police have been accused of harassing a series of journalists and violently arresting ecologists who, their backers say, have nothing to do with the charges brought against them.
Medvedev said yesterday that online public discussion on the draft is supposed to last for a month before it is introduced to the State Duma mid-September, after which it will come into force at the beginning of next year. But while new legislation may look like a logical next step, making real reform happen could take much more. “This isn’t a problem with the law – it’s a problem of mentality,” said Mikheev. |
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