 |
BORIS KAGARLITSKY, MOSCOW
POLICE MAJOR YEVSYUKOV AND OTHERS
The case against police major Denis Yevsyukov is ready to be taken to court. Former head of the Moscow Police Department “Tsaritsyno”, who shot down people in “Ostrov” supermarket in April 2009, is charged with murder of two people and attempted murder of 21 people. The final version of the indictment stresses the fact that Denis Yevsyukov attempted to kill policemen seeking to arrest him.
The prosecution interprets this episode as “making an attempt on a law enforcement officer’s life” (Clause 317, the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation).
Meanwhile, the Russian people do not regard the major’s case as an isolated and exceptional event, but as a crying and tragically absurd example of a phenomenon that Russians call “cop outrage”. Almost every day the news programmes report that detained people are beaten (and sometimes even killed) in police stations, that policemen extort money and take bribes from people, which has become such a frequent practice that those phenomena are noticed only when it comes to extremely large sums of money.
Given the current situation, major Yevsyukov is supposed to become a kind of a “sin offering” that the Ministry of the Interior and the whole law enforcement system are ready to make to the society in order to calm the population and to “close the question” for some time. Forensic experts have determined that Denis Yevsyukov is of sound mind and now he faces life imprisonment. However the ordinary citizens are unlikely to accept the wordings of the investigators who consider the major’s very grave crime only as his shooting with other policemen, where, by the way, there were no victims, rather than as a murder of civilians.
In terms of social criteria, which are accepted in the modern world, the Ministry of the Interior and its police units belong to the same sphere as public health and education. The Western researchers regard the number of police per capita as one of living standards' indicators, and as a security and stability factor. But totally different things occur in Russia as well as in many other countries. The presence of policemen often frightens law-abiding citizens rather than quiets them. In this sense Russia resembles a third world country not a West European state.
In fact, various excesses also take place in the West. For example, in Paris the immigrant quarters revolted expressing their indignation at the policemen’s killing an Arab boy several years ago. The events, which cause the people’s rage in the Western Europe, have long surprised nobody in Russia.
On the other hand, efficiency of the law enforcement agencies and their ability to perform their duties are intimately connected with the law-abiding population’s confidence in those agencies. The people’s confidence in the police is extremely low, so they are not ready to cooperate with the police. This, in its turn, makes the police less efficient, which shakes the society’s faith in the police. It is a vicious circle.
The authorities react to the confidence crisis impelling filmmakers to work on numerous films and serials about “good cops”. This flow of propagandistic material is to change the mass consciousness, but what’s happening is quite the reverse. Some films are good, but let’s not mix the cinema and the reality.
Certainly, far from all policemen are extortioners and sadists, there are many decent policemen carrying out their duties honestly. More than that, a petty extortioner can throw himself into the fire in a heroic way saving a child or cover civilians with his body during his shooting with bandits. In other words, the policemen do their work. But the real “positive examples” are so mixed with many well-known scandalous facts that policemen scare the people rather than soothe them. And while sometimes those fears are unfounded, they are nevertheless understandable.
The confidence crisis has become so deep that the Ministry of the Interior is unlikely to get away with only one sin offering represented by Major Yevsyukov, there is a need to reform the whole police. However, strangely enough, the Russian authorities, who like various reforms, are ready to reform anything but the police. For many years the government has been reforming the education, which nobody asked to do, and the society resists the reform desperately. This reform results are scandalous, even the authorities themselves do not dare to discuss them openly and focus only on the necessity “to continue improving the system”, in other words, on partial correction of consequences of their own measures. But the authorities are trying to reform the public health, the social security and the pension system in the same way. The recent damage at Sayano-Shushenskaya power plant shows how the energy sector has been reformed. It is ironic that the authorities seek to reform what works satisfactorily and does not annoy the society. Of course, even in those spheres there are a lot of problems and there become more and more of them (due to the reformers’ actions). But the sphere, which needs reforming most of all, is not reformed.
The conclusion suggests itself. The Russian officials like the police and its relations with people as they are. If the entire police could be privatized, it would have been done long ago (however, now there appear various private security firms, many of which are, as a matter of fact, the privatized units of the Ministry of the Interior and the other military, security and law enforcement agencies, some of those firms are the legalized armed gangs). But the police commercialization would deprive the authorities of their important repressive instrument, or rather of the opportunity to use that instrument efficiently and quickly. Reforms are unnecessary without a commercial prospect, since in Russia any reforms consist in commercial use of the former national property.
Meanwhile, the issue of the police reforms is on the agenda and it cannot be replaced by Major Yevsyukov trial. The trial can only draw the society’s attention to the problem once again and to the fact that the authorities are not going to address the problem.
Boris Kagarlitsky is a Director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements
September 14, 2009
|
|
|
