When officers of the new patrol police recently arrested a
young,
unemployed actor named Vladimir for a drunken midday nap on
Market Square — the leafy center of this picturesque,
cobblestoned city
in western Ukraine — two giggling friends
asked to snap a selfie with the detainee.
A
fit, fresh-faced police officer consented, allowing them to clamber
into the back seat of his white Toyota Prius patrol car while the
disheveled Vladimir soon began flirting with the female battalion
commander. The scene was a marked contrast with the old police force, an
all-male preserve whose officers regularly punched first and then asked
questions.
“Soft,”
pronounced Sgt. Mykola Lozynsky, a veteran at the station where
Vladimir, 26, was taken for booking. “They don’t know how to work.”
It
is a common appraisal by members of the old police force, known as the
militia, of the thousands of novice officers deployed in major Ukrainian
cities starting last July. There should be at least 10,000 new officers
by the end of the year in a country where a patchwork of law
enforcement agencies has about 140,000 uniformed officers.
Much is riding on the neophyte force, which is often praised as the only tangible sign of change 20 months after protests toppled the government.
Ukrainians
pushing for change believe that for any reform to take root, the
country needs to rebuild its criminal justice system from scratch, and
it particularly must have a less abusive police force.
The
new patrol officers are envisioned as the independent wedge that will
begin to transform the entire system. With the two forces set to begin
merging on Saturday, the question is whether the good can drive out the
bad, and whether a merged force rife with mistrust between the old and
the new can work effectively.
“Police
reform will be the engine of overall reform,” said Mustafa Nayyem, who
is often credited with starting the Ukrainian uprising with a Facebook
post. Mr. Nayyem, 34, is one of scores of new, young Parliament members
struggling to reshape the petrified system they fought to overthrow. He
even plans to head the new police force in two eastern cities once
controlled by separatists.
To
their myriad fans, the new officers embody the right kind of change:
idealistic, helpful, diverse, clean and drilled endlessly that public
service is their main task.
To skeptics, they represent what is fundamentally wrong with the current attempt to overhaul Ukraine: a superficial change to the patina of urban life while venality and incompetence endure behind every government facade.
“It
is a good image, but it is useless,” said Andriy Dudnyk, a Kiev
businessman, describing the new police force. “Is it revolutionary? Yes.
Is it provocative? Yes. Is it a step in the right direction? Yes. Has
it achieved any real result? No.”
Many
Ukrainians criticize what they see as the glacial pace of change and
the lack of progress on two issues in particular. No senior figure has
been convicted on corruption charges, and investigators have yet to
identify anyone responsible for the massacre of about 100 protesters on the Maidan, Kiev’s main square, during the February 2014 uprising.
Overshadowing it all is the separatist war in the east, where a cease-fire is finally holding and a peace a greement
has been extended past its Dec. 31 deadline. The ultimate status of the
breakaway regions, however, and the extent to which Russia will use
them to destabilize Ukraine remains a dark cloud.
Despite
President Petro O. Poroshenko’s promises that he is committed to “deep
reform,” Ukrainians increasingly question whether Mr. Poroshenko, a
50-year-old billionaire chocolate baron, is the right man to dismantle
an oligarchy. In Ukraine, where the 10 richest men control 20 percent of
the wealth, oligarchs buy factories and judges with equal ease.
A
poll conducted by the Razumkov Center, a policy research organization
in Kiev, found that 36 percent of the 2,011 people questioned last
summer thought Mr. Poroshenko was the main promoter of change, while 39
percent named him the main brake.
Ukraine
“is trying to be a new country, but it cannot function with old
institutions,” said Mikheil Saakashvili, the former president of Georgia
who was appointed the governor of the Ukrainian region of Odessa, at a
recent forum.
Members
of the militia were seen as “monsters,” said Mr. Nayyem, so the idea
was to create a popular new force that could leverage its standing to
compel change.
“Someday,
the new police will come into conflict with other branches of the
security forces, and the judiciary,” he said. “The outcome of that
conflict will depend on the people’s support.”
The
attempt to make them popular seems to be working. Calls to the police
are markedly up in cities where the new officers have been deployed, and
some clips from their body cameras — another innovation — that showed
officers arresting a drunken soccer star and questioning a bishop, for
example, became social media sensations.
Not
all the attention is positive. One widely shared video showed new
police officers beating a vagrant with batons. At least 30 new officers
have been dismissed for infractions like sleeping on the job, though
none for corruption, Mr. Nayyem said. Their salaries were raised to
almost $400 a month, roughly three times the basic police salary
previously, to decrease the temptation to demand payoffs.
The
new police received just 10 weeks of training that included classes on
criminal law, reporting traffic accidents and respecting gay rights,
another first in Ukraine. Women, previously limited to clerical roles,
make up about one-quarter of the new force.
American
police officers conducted some of the training, funded by the $38
million that the State Department is spending to try to improve the rule
of law in Ukraine.
The
new police deal with low-level infractions, while the militia handles
major crimes. The public line is that the two forces get along better
all the time, but when they intersect they keep a wary distance.
Some
militia members, who still run police stations, have brazenly
undermined the work of the new police, releasing suspects right under
the noses of the officers who arrested them. Four deputy chiefs in Kiev
were dismissed over the lack of cooperation, said Eka Zguladze, 37, the
first deputy interior minister, who is in charge of overhauling the
police.
The
fact that the government shoved aside the locals and imported Ms.
Zguladze, who once carried out police reforms in her native Georgia,
fueled significant resentment, as did the appointment of Khatia
Dekanoidze, a former education minister of Georgia, to run the national
police.
“They
substitute real action with aggressive rhetoric that all the policemen
who worked before were corrupt bribe takers and evil psychologically,”
said Aleksey Lazarenko, a police colonel who lost his job under the
changes.
Among
rank-and-file officers, Mr. Lazarenko said, 50 percent think nothing
will change, 25 percent think things will improve once the new officers
gain experience and 25 percent loathe them.
New
police officers tend to exude a peach-fuzzy uncertainty when they
engage suspects. They also look American because the United States
donated the uniforms. Hence the entire program is often labeled “Police
Academy” after the slapstick movie series about novice officers running
amok.
“It
is better for somebody to smile at you, remembering an American comedy,
rather than to see that old Soviet cop with a 200-pound belly and $200
sticking out of his pocket from his last bribe,” Ms. Zguladze said.
Andriy
Sadovyi, Lviv’s mayor, extols the new police as a main hope for change.
The new patrol police chief here, Yuri Zozulya, was quick to challenge
authority, the mayor said, which made him the target of a slur campaign
by the old police.
Mr.
Zozulya, 27, a martial arts aficionado and a former investment banker,
provided abundant ammunition. Shortly after he began his new job, he was
stopped for speeding, and it emerged that he had six outstanding
traffic violations. Old pictures suddenly cropped up on social media,
showing candid public moments of him swigging from a bottle of Jack
Daniel’s. Finally, he was stopped at the Polish border when he tried to
import an undeclared cache of painkillers that he said was for soldiers
fighting the separatists. (The painkillers were confiscated, but he was
not detained or arrested.)
In an interview, he shrugged off the incidents as the teething pains of an unexpected police chief.
During
the Maidan protests, Mr. Zozulya used his martial arts background to
help defend the demonstrators, battling the militia constantly. The
Interior Ministry appointed him to the chief’s job partly because he was
forceful toward militia members.
Since
then, Mr. Zozulya has fearlessly issued traffic tickets to a politician
and other influential figures. He succinctly summed up the philosophy
that the new police officers are supposed to spread throughout Ukraine.
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