The idealistic young officer, Marat Sagitov, who had a law degree, decided to expose Colonel Kuantay Uteshev’s corruption. He asked the police under his command to document the payoffs in signed depositions, which he mailed to the regional governor and posted on a government website.
To ordinary Kazakhs who have dealt with the police, the outcome was predictable. Trumped-up charges of corruption were brought against Sagitov, the whistleblower. He spent two years in prison. The Sagitov case is a dramatic example of how rife police corruption is in the former Soviet Union. It starts with traffic police shaking down drivers. It moves up the food chain to demands for hefty bribes to drop charges in serious criminal cases. It also includes police fabricating cases against innocent people to meet conviction quotas set by police brass.
And, in some of the worst situations, it involves police working with corrupt government officials and criminal gangs to rob people of their property, including homes and businesses.
Underscoring the pervasiveness of police corruption in the former Soviet Union are annual lists of the 10 most corrupt police forces in the world. Most of the lists, which are compiled by human rights and news organizations, include Uzbekistan and Russia.
When Dmitry Medvedev became Russia’s president in 2008, he said he would make stamping out police and court corruption a priority. He shepherded legislation through parliament aimed at stopping the scourge and took other steps to combat it. But two years later, he threw up his hands and admitted his efforts had failed.
The current president, Vladimir Putin, denies that police and judicial corruption are widespread. But the evidence indicates otherwise. As just one example, more than a million Russians have bought dashboard cameras — or dash cams — in recent years so they could record traffic police stops. They not only want to record over-the-top bribe demands but also verbal intimidation or physical abuse at the hands of the police.
“The Russian Highway Patrol is known throughout the land for brutality, corruption, extortion and making an income on bribes,” Marina Galperina, a Russia native who now lives in New York, wrote in her popular blog. “Dash cams won’t protect you from being extorted for cash” if you are speeding or committing other traffic violations, she said. “It will, however, keep you safer from drunks in uniform, false accusations” and exorbitant bribe demands.
When rank-and-file residents of the former Soviet Union think about corruption, the first group that comes to mind are the traffic police. That is because a lot more of them have experienced traffic-cop bribe demands than demands from higher-ranking police or government officials.
This has led to grassroots hatred of traffic police.
This is why ordinary Armenians cheered when two traffic-police colonels, Margar Ohanian and Stepan Karakhanian, were arrested on corruption charges in 2011, tired of the endemic corruption in our law enforcement agencies. Ohanian was the head of the traffic police and Karakhanian one of his deputies. Typically, traffic police on the street must share the bribes they get with higher-ups, but the charges against the colonels involved embezzlement. They were accused of stealing and selling 150 tons of fuel earmarked for police vehicles. At the same time that prosecutors brought the embezzling cases, they announced they were looking into allegations that traffic police were also taking bribes to issue driver’s licenses.
Although welcomed, such efforts to drive down the poisonous levels of corruption in our police — and in our country as a whole — remain few and far between.
One of the first things Mikheil Saakashvili did when he became president of Georgia in 2004 was try to end the country’s endemic corruption. The only way to get rid of traffic-police corruption, he decided, was to fire the lot of them, which he did in 2006. The new traffic cops were paid 10 times more than their predecessors — a powerful incentive to be courteous and helpful to citizens they came in contact with, and not to solicit bribes. Almost a decade after the mass replacement of Georgia’s traffic police, most drivers report few instances of corruption.
Ukraine made headlines recently when it decided to follow Georgia’s lead. It will be replacing its bribe-taking traffic cops with a Western-trained force this summer, quadrupling the new cops’ salaries. The transformation is being overseen by Eka Zguladze, a deputy interior minister who presided over the same change in Georgia, where she is originally from.“In a country as rife with corruption as Ukraine, implementing police reforms may seem trite,” the Christian Science Monitor reported. “But advocates of the move say it may be just what the country needs now. On a day-to-day scale, Ukrainians are more likely to feel the brunt of corruption in small measures, such as paying a bribe to get out of a speeding ticket.”
Although traffic cops are despised across the former Soviet Union, the abuses they commit pale next to the ones committed by police investigators and higher-ups.
Take the case of Yevgeny Tkachuk, the managing director of a small wholesale company in Moscow. After he rejected a company partner’s attempt to extort money from him, he said, police showed up at his apartment banging so loud that they scared his children. When he opened the door, they accused him of fraud. Two judges in a row threw out the charges against him, saying there was no evidence he had committed a crime, but police continued investigating him. Before the nightmare was over, Tkachuk had lost his job and was in debt.
Nothing was done to the partner who he said had tried to extort money from him or the police investigators who brought the false charges. “Those at the bottom know their superiors will always cover for them and protect them,” he said.
In another outrageous case in Russia, a police major in the southern part of the country, Aleksei Dymovsky, was suspended after posting videos on YouTube that described widespread corruption in his department.Among his allegations were that his bosses had ordered him to arrest innocent people or face the punishment of working overtime without pay. As in the case of the Kazakh police whistleblower Marat Sagitov, a corruption investigation was started against Dymovsky.
How do you end the kind of pervasive police corruption that you see across the former Soviet Union — corruption that impacts lives and livelihoods at all levels?
The most important step is to give police salaries that are high enough that bribes are unnecessary.
A second step would be to establish a hotline or website where the public could report police corruption anonymously.
A third step would be to appoint special prosecutors to investigate and bring charges against corrupt cops.
That way, the cops’ higher-ups and their prosecutor buddies would be unable to protect them. An even more important step than all the others combined would be for government leaders to get serious about rooting out police corruption instead of just giving the subject lip service.
Saakashvili has his detractors, but Georgia is a much less corrupt country today than before he became president because of his determination to stamp out graft among government officials, judges and police.
Armine Sahakyan is a human rights activist based in Armenia.
