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| NEWS > 06 March 2011 |
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Russian police embrace crime a
TWO out of three Russian policemen think that torturing suspects is acceptable, while more than a quarter admit to extorting bribes. Even so, most of Russia's police cannot understand why they are unpopular, a new opinion poll has found.
The study will not surprise most Russians, who regard much of the force as corrupt, thuggish and out of control.
Indeed 45 per cent of police, according to the pollsters, see their main priority as protecting the rich and powerful rather than the public - or perhaps to protect them from the public. Just under 60 per cent admitted to supplemen... Read more
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The Guardian
06 March 2011
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Ethics in Policing
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UK: Coalition's US-style shakeup of police 'would breed corruption'
The government's blueprint for police reform, modelled largely on US cities such as New York, will breed corruption and undermine the professionalism of the force, a former senior prosecutor from Manhattan has warned.
New York's former chief assistant district attorney, Jessica de Grazia, has joined the growing chorus of criticism over proposals from Britain's coalition government to introduce elected police commissioners, among a range of controversial reforms including cuts in pay and conditions. De Grazia will appear alongside the police minister, Nick Herbert, at a Westminster conference this week to condemn the introduction of a US-style system.
She said that, although New York's transformation from America's "murder capital" to its "safest big city" was impressive, the coalition's plans to borrow elements of US policing would not work in England and Wales.
"You don't have to have elected commissioners to cut crime; it's a mistake to equate the two. The worst-case scenario from the plans is that the professionalism of the police could be downgraded, and that could cause corruption and the public to lose confidence in the police," said De Grazia, who served in the New York district attorney's office from 1975 to 1987 and became Manhattan's most senior non-elected law officer, in charge of 400 lawyers, fraud investigators and prosecutors.
The coalition has looked across the Atlantic for inspiration in its police reforms, with the home secretary, Theresa May, citing New York as a model for reducing police numbers, and Herbert meeting New York police commissioners on their home turf.
But De Grazia cites a series of major scandals in New York as exposing the risks of elected commissioners, including the systemic recording of serious offences as minor in order to keep crime figures artificially low and the subsequent failure by an elected commissioner to properly investigate the allegations.
"There is always a risk of police corruption, but there is both a higher risk and incidence when you place the police directly under the control of an elected politician. I don't believe the government's bill in its current form sufficiently recognises this risk and takes step to mitigate it," she said.
"If you are going to take another country's governance system, then you should import the checks and balances from that system. That has not happened in this case. The problem appears to be that they are looking only at crime reduction and not corruption."
De Grazia, who produced a critical government-commissioned report into the Serious Fraud Office in 2008, added that ministers had also disregarded major differences between the UK and US criminal justice systems. "In the US prosecutors can initiate investigations, while in the UK we are completely dependent on the police. Investigative decision-making is non-transparent by its very nature and that means there is a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong, deliberately or through operator error."
The Home Office strongly denies such claims, but De Grazia said she had been approached by a number of veteran Scotland Yard CID commanders who had experienced police corruption first-hand and were "horrified" by plans to install an elected commissioner with the power to hire and fire chief constables.
Her comments come ahead of Tuesday's publication of a review of police wages and conditions that will pave the way for their first major overhaul in more than 30 years. The review, by former rail regulator Tom Winsor, is expected to recommend a reduction in overtime payments, housing and travel allowances and suggest changes to pensions and shift patterns along with the abolition of bonuses.
Relations between ministers and the police are already tense, worsening further last week after May appeared to pre-judge Winsor's review by announcing that cuts in police pay and conditions are unavoidable. The Police Federation has warned of a "morale meltdown", with mass protests by officers a possibility.
Both Winsor and Herbert will face a sticky ride at the Westminster conference on Thursday when they face speakers from the Police Federation, the Association of Police Authorities – the organisation that will be scrapped through the introduction of elected commissioners – and police superintendents angry over the direction of reform.
De Grazia said: "You have to be prepared for the possibility that a person without the integrity we would want to see gets elected and uses their power over the police chief to improperly influence decisions about cases. The government has said it will protect operational independence, but how will it?"
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