Eastern Europe's police forces court public opinion

Contemporary Review, Dec, 1998 by Thomas Land

The traditionally repressive state security services of East-Central Europe have been perceived for generations as the enemy of ordinary citizens. Now they must win widespread public support in order to confront organized crime successfully. Can they achieve that?

The underpaid and overworked state security services of formerly Soviet-dominated East-Central Europe have embarked on a radical internal reform programme to suppress corruption and civil rights abuse within their ranks in order to win the approval of the public. They are facing an uphill task.

The purge of corrupt officers is sweeping the region at an accelerating pace. It will bring enormous relief to the trading partners of these countries who have paid clearly for the tradition of low wages and high bribes inherited from the region's former communist masters.

These countries are bowing to pressure from the West to clean up their security services. Their law enforcement agencies employing mostly poorly trained and equipped staff provide plenty of opportunities for their officers to abuse public power for private gain. Yet they have found themselves in the very centre of their societies' struggle to establish confidence in public administration.

The public is deeply sceptical. The concept of democratic rights in the face of anonymous authority wielded by uniformed officials is still novel in the transition societies of this region.

They have been conditioned by decades of callous corruption at the hands of the security services of the communists, preceded by the brutal administration of the Gestapo during the war and the tradition of paternalistic, bureaucracy under the Austro-Hungarian empire as well as the Tsars of Russia.

The crime fighters of post-communist Europe lack any democratic tradition in the enforcement of the rule of law beyond loyalty to the rulers of the day. Now they must learn to defend the public interest according to new concepts of personal accountability.

The issues are enormous. For the implosion of communist administration a decade ago has left behind a power vacuum quickly filled by organized crime. Yet the security services of the fledgling democratic administrations of the region cannot establish and indeed defend law and order in the absence of widespread public support.

To win the sympathy of the public, the police, the Customs and the other uniformed crime-fighting services must become widely perceived as the servants and defenders rather than enemies and repressors of ordinary citizens. Can they achieve that?

Sandor Pinter, the Minister of Interior in Hungary's recently elected centre-right administration - and himself a former police chief - declares: 'It is simply essential to improve relations between the police and the public. In my view, the police should be aware which aspects of crime offend the public the most in order to concentrate our resources on these very areas. That means a relentless hunt for offenders profiting from drugs, car theft and burglaries. And, perhaps even more importantly, we must confront the abuse of authority by the police themselves.'

Pinter has just established a highly mobile supervisory force comprising 18 high-ranking police officers to investigate complaints made by the public against the service.

Colonel Karoly Krozsel who is in charge of the new taskforce, has been given access to all police files - including those allegedly containing complaints levelled against the police and 'lost' in transit between investigating authorities. His cruising inspectors have already won the respect as well as the fear of officers on the beat who frequently alert each other by telephone when they become aware that they have come under their scrutiny.

More ominously perhaps, an authoritative new study concludes that as much as 66 per cent of the entire national police force still believes that different classes of civilians are entitled to different treatment and consideration by officialdom. Some 77 per cent of the public is said to share that view.

The study has been published by specialist investigators of the Council of Europe following exhaustive interviews with several hundreds of officers in the security services as well as the public. Sandor Gesko, in charge of the studies, found that the majority of policemen dismissed the very concept of human rights as a game played by awkward, upper-class fools. They thought that rights abuses mattered only when they could be proved in subsequent investigations.

Gesko also perceived a widespread sense of inferiority and resentment harboured by the police in relation to the public, which he described as highly

dangerous.

Indeed, the educational standards of officers in the security services are rising throughout East-Central Europe; but in the older generations they are still largely below secondary-school-leaving level. The take-home pay of an officer on the beat, below [pounds]120 a month, is notoriously low for a dangerous job with a huge workload.

This makes an officer vulnerable to corruption. And it makes him a poor choice for the star role in a regional public relations exercise intended to win the sympathy and approval of ordinary citizens for the police.