Police Versus Citizens
Nowadays Russia is going through a democratization of the country,
which means that the implementation of the legislative rights of a person is considered to
be one of the major issues. Under legislation each person in the country has a great
variety of rights, which other citizens are obliged to respect.
According to the law “About Police” the police are one of the main
authorities in the sphere of domestic affairs that are appealed to to protect life,
health, rights and the interests of the society and the government from criminal and
unlawful encroachment. Moreover, police are forbidden to resort to force, torture or other
such violent treatment that can disgrace a person. But is this legislation followed?
For the last few years this question has stayed on the surface without
a positive answer. Do we really have such a terrible situation in the sphere of domestic
affairs?
According to statistics collected by the Ministry of Domestic Affairs
during 2000–2006, we do. With every year the quantity of people who have lost trust in
the police and who prefer not to apply to them for help is rapidly growing. The main
reason is that very often the official “guardians of law and order” don’t meet the
requirements of their job: some of them are violent to suspects; some take bribes to close
a case, etc.
More and more people complain against the behavior of policemen, who
are simply playing a role of “anti-guards of the law”. For example, let us remember
the phenomena of “warring police”. Annually, hundreds of policemen from different
regions are being sent to so-called “hot spots” for a period of time. Such experience
destroys all conception of a peaceful defender of the law. As a result, we have plenty of
policemen who come back from war to normal work, but with a violent view, having a
“Chechenian syndrome”, which provokes aggressiveness in the surrounding people. As a
consequence – violation of the law towards citizens.
Lately this problem has become so alarming that the government decided
to add some restrictions to the law and to be more attentive to the activities of the
police. In the first instance, they started with GIBDD, as one of the most corrupt
departments of the police.
On 23.03.2007 the Levada Center published the results of a sociological
study on the topic of the restrictions of the law concerning the road. 1600 Russian
citizens aged 18+ took part in the research.
1. Will checking the work of GIBDD lead to improvement in the work of
GIBDD and to the reduction of the level of corruption?
30% improvement, reduction of corruption
58% nothing will change
12% don’t know
2. What will the restriction of the punishment for a breach of PDD lead
to?
29% to reduction of accidents on the road
57% considerable increase of corruption
15% don’t know
As you can see, the results of the research prove that citizens are so
mistrustful of the reliability of the police nowadays that they think that even several
restrictions won’t be able to change the whole picture; that the government is only
feeding people with some small hope of a bright future, and that all the policemen are
focused on bribes.
But is it fair to blame only the policemen with this tricky problem?
And what about the people who give bribes to avoid some difficulties in their lives? They
have a choice, nobody presses them, but they still prefer to give some money just to
protect themselves. It’s just sheer madness by certain people to blame everybody around
them but themselves. And what we really have to do to help the country solve this problem
is to start solving it ourselves, in our own personal situations.
By Tatyana Komarova
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