The broken promises of Ukraine’s police reform

The introduction of the new patrol police was perhaps the most visible of the reforms proposed by the authorities who came to power following the Revolution of Dignity. Photo by Chris Collison

“I know what it’s like when the police beat you,” Franchuk told me. “I know what it’s like when you are standing up against the police. I wanted to change this system. I wanted to change everything and make sure that the police never beat peaceful people who just want to protest.”

The introduction of the new patrol police was perhaps the most visible of the reforms proposed by the authorities who came to power following the revolution. Like Franchuk, the new officers were young and full of the idealism that permeated the streets of Kyiv during the heady days that led to the ouster of the corrupt and kleptocratic president, Viktor Yanukovych. But over the last three years, many of the revolutionaries who joined this new police force have quietly left after running up against a law enforcement system that has changed little on the inside and facing a bureaucracy staffed by old figures who remain resistant to reform.

Pressure from above

Franchuk now works as a computer programmer in Lviv and volunteers for a camp for boys that teaches patriotism and survival skills. He said he did not take the decision to leave the patrol police lightly, but he had earned a reputation as a troublemaker for writing reports on his superiors, especially one who, he said, pressured him to issue large numbers of citations during his shifts.

“I wrote that he gave us orders to write protocols [citations] on everyone who moves – even if it was some small violation of the law, not even a criminal thing but an administrative thing,” Franchuk said. “I didn’t understand why, so I made reports and he was demoted to just an ordinary police officer because I made a lot of effort to talk with my bosses.”

Eventually, the reform’s shortcomings and pressure from above became too much. “My boss thought I was the kind of person who wanted to find something bad in the police and make a lot of reports,” Franchuk said. “It’s good when you are quiet and just do your job.”

The number of officers who have quit or were dismissed has steadily increased each year since the introduction of the patrol police. In 2018, the patrol police lost 2,351 officers, more than 12 per cent of the entire force, according to records provided by the Ukrainian government. The number was 1,309 in 2017 and only 601 in 2016.

Like Franchuk, Oleksiy Nikolaevskiy, a digital marketing specialist who spent two years as a patrol police officer in Kyiv, said he also grew frustrated with the police bureaucracy and the limits of reform efforts.

“In general, it is better with the reform than without. That is for sure,” Nikolaevskiy said. “But I think it could have been done a lot better. There was a lot of potential. There were people who were ready to work. But they lost that potential. Now people don’t join the police.” Nikolaevskiy said he also felt pressure from his superiors to issues unnecessary citations.

“In the old police, the leaders would tell the officers that they would need to write up ten protocols on a shift,” Nikolaevskiy recalled. “That was known as the ‘fingers system.’ When the police were established, they said there would be no fingers system. But the way it worked was that if you didn’t fill out enough protocols, then you would be the last to get off your shift. The last person would leave one and a half, two hours later. So there was no fingers system, but there was definitely unspoken pressure.”

The violent and inhumane treatment of protesters by law enforcement during the 2013-2014 protests brought police reform to the top of the agenda. Immediately following the ouster of Yanukovych, the country’s notorious elite riot squad, the Berkut, was disbanded and for several days regular police officers all but vanished from the streets of Kyiv out of fear of retaliation by the victorious protesters and interim authorities.

Prior to post-revolutionary reforms, the police were known as the militsiya, meaning militia, a name carried over from the Soviet Union. The militia were reviled throughout Ukrainian society for their failure to pursue crimes, gross incompetence and rampant corruption at all levels. Bribery was an endlessly frustrating fact of life for most people, especially drivers who were constantly being flagged down by road police looking for a quick buck. The consensus was that Ukraine was in need of sweeping police reform. Georgia, which enacted radical reform of its police and fired every officer in the country following the 2005 Rose Revolution, was the model that most cited, while the United States, Canada and Japan provided support and training.

Reality check

In late 2014 the Ukrainian parliament passed a law mandating police reform. Tasked with spearheading the reform were Khatia Dekanoidze and Eka Zguladze, two Georgian policymakers who had worked on overhauling Georgia’s police force under President Mikheil Saakashvili nearly a decade earlier. The two most visible arms of the former militia – the road inspectors and the patrol force – were to be combined into a single unit, known simply as the patrol police. The new officers would stand in striking contrast with their predecessors. An age limit of 35 was set for recruitment, and applicants had to pass an IQ test and undergo a number of training programmes developed by NGOs and police trainers from the US and Canada.

In the summer of 2015 the new officers began rolling out in sparkling new Toyota Priuses donated by Japan. They were first introduced to the streets of Kyiv and then to other cities throughout the country over the next year. The patrol police were an instant hit. Young, polite and with a notably large proportion of female recruits, they soon became known as the “selfie cops” for posing with Ukrainians for photos to post on social media. Trust in law enforcement rose sharply when the new patrol police were introduced. They responded quickly to calls and took the job seriously.

However, reform efforts began running into reality. The patrol police were only one branch of the newly rebranded National Police of Ukraine. Reformers had called for the replacement of all members of the former militia, but the process proved more difficult than many had anticipated. The ministry of internal affairs, under the leadership of Arsen Avakov, launched a process known as attestation that was meant to investigate and review members of the former militia and dismiss or demote those who were found to be corrupt or incompetent. The process was meant to reduce the size of the national police force by about 30 per cent.

Dekanoidze, who headed the National Police, announced in 2016 that 26 percent of the commanders had been sacked. According to National Police figures, nearly 84,000 police went through the attestation process and more than 15,000 did not pass, of whom more than 5,000 were dismissed. However, a court decision in 2017 reinstated nearly half of those who had been dismissed, citing violations in the attestation process. Around that time, the Georgian reformer left.

“I think they were more successful in Georgia than in Ukraine because, although the model of reform was the same, Georgia is a much smaller country,” admitted Andriy Chernousov, a former police officer and lawyer who investigates police issues for the Kharkiv Institute for Social Research.

Stalled investigations and conflicts of interest

Among the most common criticisms of Ukraine’s police and law enforcement over the past two years has been the failure to bring justice to the victims of high-profile crimes and attacks. According to human rights groups, there have been more than 130 attacks against journalists and activists since 2017, and almost all of them have gone unsolved or unpunished. Although suspects are sometimes arrested, the attacks are often classified as “hooliganism”, a relatively minor offense compared to a premeditated assault or hate crime.

In November 2018, Kateryna Handzyuk, a civic activist from the southern city of Kherson, died after spending several weeks in the hospital from injuries sustained when an attacker doused her in sulfuric acid. Although several people were arrested, it was clear that none had ordered the attack. Her death sparked outrage among Ukrainian civil society leaders, who launched a campaign called “Who Ordered the Killing of Katya Handzyuk?” to pressure the criminal justice system to follow up on the case. According Vladislav Serdyuk, a former police officer who advised Dekanoidze during the reforms, it was the latest example of impunity by people in power who order such attacks against journalists and activists to sow fear.

“These are active people from society who are trying to change something in Ukraine and really want Ukraine to be a normal, civilised, European country,” Serdyuk said. “There is another part of society and members of the authorities who do not want that. They want to live like they did before.”

Less high-profile cases also go unpunished. Although patrol police officers can detain those suspected of crimes, the cases are then passed on to investigators in the national police structure. Current and former police officers said they often felt their hands were tied in such cases. “They changed the guys who are on shifts, but the guys who are investigating the crimes are the same,” Franchuk said. “And for me it was really hard to co-operate with them, because some of them didn’t understand why the Revolution of Dignity happened. When you went on a call, you tried to do something and to investigate and find the guy who did the crime, but you knew that the guy after you who is supposed to investigate would do nothing.”

Improved relations with the community

At a patrol police department in Kharkiv, officers said they remained optimistic that the police had changed for the better. Like Franchuk, Vlad Nemanikhin was active during Ukraine’s revolution and joined the patrol police in 2015 to have a positive impact on society.

“It’s no secret that before, when the militia would arrive on a call, they would ask for money,” Nemanikhin said. “They would say, ‘Give us some money or we aren’t going to do anything.’ That was the structure. I joined the police because I wanted to change that.”

The department has launched a number of outreach efforts to improve relations with the community, such as going into local schools and holding events to increase trust between Kharkiv residents and police institutions. Police say these efforts have had an effect, but surveys from the Kharkiv Institute of Social Research found that 40 per cent of victims do not notify police about crimes. The large majority said they did not report crimes because they were either disappointed in the effectiveness of the police or believed they were uninterested in such incidents.

Aleksandr Grebenyuk, deputy head of the patrol police department in Kharkiv, disputed the report’s findings, saying he believes relations with the community are improving.

“I have to say that I doubt that 40 percent of people don’t go to the police, because each year the number is growing,” Grebenyuk said. “We have statistics showing that compared to 2015 the number of people who went to the police has doubled. This is not to say there are more crimes, but that more people trust the police and are calling us about different issues.”

It is true that surveys continue to show higher levels of trust in the police, especially the patrol police, than before the reforms took place. That trust is due in large part to the much higher levels of professionalism among patrol police officers, although trust has begun trending downward. Grebenyuk believes many of the negative attitudes towards police are left over from the pre-reform era.

Current and former police emphasise that one of the biggest successes of the police reform has been in the willingness of police officers to respond to calls: “Now police arrive at a call after 10-15 minutes,” Franchuk said. “Before the Revolution of Dignity, when you called the police they might not even come. Now they come, they come really fast, so if it’s an emergency it can be 10 minutes.”

However, while police behaviour has improved, what happens after many police interactions remains mired in problems. This issue is evidenced by the survey, which found that nearly three-quarters of crime victims were unsatisfied with the way that police treated their case.

Old habits die hard when salaries are low

Some patrol officers left after becoming frustrated with what they saw as a slow return of some of the corrupt practices of the former militia. Liana Teremkova, who served as a patrol officer in Kharkiv from 2015 to 2018, said that although day-to-day bribery is much lower than it was before the reform, bribes and favours have returned to some parts of the police structure, especially in cases involving road violations.

“When we first started, a lot of people would offer us bribes, and at first everyone declined,” Teremkova said. “I think the first bribes started after about half a year. We saw it in cases with drunk drivers. It’s not a small fine. They would call us to the court and tell us that we had not correctly filled out protocols. The protocols would get lost somewhere in the administrative department.” Teremkova said the first to accept bribes were members of the former militia who worked in the administrative departments. She said that because of the low salary, some officers soon felt pressure to follow suit.

At first, salaries for patrol police were set higher than they were under the militia, an attempt to reduce the temptation to take bribes. But in 2015 Ukraine’s currency fell sharply against the dollar while the country faced its highest inflation since the troubled 1990s. Police salaries did not keep up. In Kyiv a job announcement at one of Ukraine’s largest supermarket chains last year advertised a security officer position that paid about 435 US dollars per month, slightly more than a cashier, who could make about 415 dollars. In 2018 a patrol police officer in Kyiv made a little under 390 dollars per month. That salary was raised in 2019 to just under 500 per month, while salaries in other cities are lower.

Nikolaevskiy said that working 12-hour patrols on a salary comparable to a supermarket security officer was demoralising: “There were people in my group who would work for the police during the day and then drive a taxi at night,” he said. “It’s not okay.” Nikolaevskiy said he also noticed a return to bad practices, primarily in the administrative offices, where cases would get lost or resolved informally. He described incidents in which a drunk driver had his license revoked only to see it reinstated after making a deal with the administrators. He said that jumping through bureaucratic loops to properly issue citations only to see the process disrupted took its toll.

“Those incidents are very demoralising because you spend your energy on it, you want to do everything honestly, you find a driver who broke the law, fill out all these forms and collect the evidence, he swears at you while you’re doing that, but you follow it through to the end, and in two days you understand that it was all in vain.”

Although there have been reports of bribery, levels of everyday corruption appear to be nowhere near pre-reform levels, the low salaries and deteriorating morale among rank-and-file officers threaten to bring more of the old practices back to the streets.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has promised to shake up the leadership of Ukraine’s ministries, including replacing the country’s top prosecutor and implementing judicial reform. However, it is not yet clear how far the new appointees are willing to go to follow through on much-needed reforms. Notably, Avakov, who as interior minister emerged as one of the most powerful government figures in post-revolution Ukraine and who holds control over both the police and the national guard, has remained in his post under the new government, even surviving the government shakeup in early March this year.

According to Chernousov, the top-down structure of the national police means local departments take orders from Kyiv and are not accountable to the needs of their local communities.

“Every police chief and every district police station is appointed by the chair of the national police – by his deputies, by the managers of the local police headquarters and so on,” Chernousov said. “We have a vertical structure. It starts and ends in Kyiv at Bohomoltsya 10 [headquarters of the ministry of internal affairs]. That means you can do whatever you want or whatever your manager asks you to do, and they don’t care about what people think is important for their security.”

He added that failure to reform the upper echelons of the police and follow through on the attestation process meant that a return to old practices was inevitable. “If you take a fresh cucumber and put it in a salted barrel of cucumbers, what happens with the fresh one?” he asked. “It will become salted in a few hours. That is what has happened with the patrol police. We inserted 12,000 rookies into a salted barrel. In a year we got salted cucumbers.”

Chris G. Collison was the recipient of a 2018-2019 Fulbright Research fellowship to study the impact of the Revolution of Dignity on civil society and civic culture in Ukraine, where he previously worked as a journalist. He holds an MA in Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies from the University in Washington. 

reform, security, Ukraine