Vladimir Putin is concerned by the fact that ordinary folk are reluctant to turn to the state for protection against crime. Addressing a conference on crime combating last Friday, the president was fairly scathing about the performance by Boris Gryzlov's department: Crime, he stressed, remains a real threat to the country while there has been no tangible change for the better.
This is a wake-up call for the interior minister and yet another reminder that it is time the Interior Ministry reform, which began more than a year ago, started producing results. Although it seems that the president himself is not very clear as to what these results should be: Concern is mainly focused on the increasing number of registered crimes. In the first quarter of the year this number has grown appreciably in 28 regions.
True, no one believes statistics nowadays, not least the president himself. The whole point of the reform was to move away from the practice of artificially suppressing crime levels and inflating solved-crimes records. While admitting that the upsurge in crime could be a product of more truthful statistics, Putin believes that it is not only a matter of statistics but also the fact that citizens still cannot rely on the power of law. Big businessmen tend to set up private security services while crimes are often simultaneously investigated by private and state structures with individuals increasingly favoring the former.
This is simply not good enough. It is a very alarming signal to the ruling authority itself - a symptom of its weakness and uncompetitiveness on the public security services market. Moreover, private security structures are not the most formidable of competitors. Thus, according to an RF Interior Ministry poll, only 24 percent of respondents said the court was the best vehicle of collecting an outstanding debt, 69 percent citing criminal structures and another 30 percent, police officers - hired in their unofficial capacity.
As a recipe for the chronic impotence of law enforcement agencies, the president proposes a traditional method: purging their ranks of officers who have turned their service into a business enterprise. True, with a radical approach, too many officials would have to be purged, and not only at the Interior Ministry. That must be why the president is considering a rotation system for law enforcement chiefs: This, in his opinion, would help retain professionals and at the same time cut them off from relationships that have evolved over the years.
Meanwhile, real professionals are few and far between: An operative or investigator typically works for three to five years and then retires to get a better paid job in the private sector. According to an Interior Ministry Research Center forecast, by 2005 virtually all the "old guard" will have gone with top positions within the Ministry hierarchy occupied by those who in the mid- and late 1990s were considered "young hopefuls" and whose mentality is decidedly mercantile.