Police Brutality in Russia: Cops for Hire
The Economist reports that Russia's police officers shoot, beat and torture civilians, confiscate businesses and take hostages; they are feared and distrusted by two-thirds of the country. And the few decent cops among them are seen as mould-breaking heroes and dissidents.
There are daily reports of police violence, including a random shooting by a police officer in a Moscow supermarket, the gruesome torture and killing of a journalist in Tomsk, and the case of Sergei Magnitsky, of Hermitage Capital Management. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a businessman The Economist notes is serving an eight-year prison sentence on trumped-up charges, has written that "the police, prosecution and prison services are component parts of an industry whose business is legitimised violence and which uses people as raw material."
The Financial Times adds that officers from the elite Omon police are at the center of allegations of corruption and criminality. Police corruption is well known to most Russians; police can be hired to do everything from guard sausage kiosks to carry out assassinations.
The Moscow Times adds that a video has surfaced on YouTube of Mikhail Fishman, editor for Russian Newsweek, and opposition politician Ilya Yashin seemingly showing them giving bribes to traffic police officers.
The Economist notes that police violence is not new in Russia, but a recent wave of publicity is; police lawlessness has exhausted people's patience. Ordinary policemen seem baffled and angered by the hypocrisy of their bosses, who have turned them into scapegoats.
Sergei Kanev, a crime reporter for Novaya Gazeta, said that the rot has now set in so deep that real reform of Russian policing would mean reform of state power. The main function of law-enforcement agencies in Russia is not to protect the public from crime and corruption, but to shield the bureaucracy, including themselves, from the public.