Police and Corruption
On December, 15th, 2011, Leonid Kosals, Senior Research Fellow of LCSR, gave a talk on “Police Corruption and Side-Work in Post-Communist Countries: Comparative Analysis”.
On December, 15th, 2011, Leonid Kosals, Senior Research Fellow of LCSR, gave a talk on “Police Corruption and Side-Work in Post-Communist Countries: Comparative Analysis”.
In his presentation Leonid Kosals focused on the problem of violence and its restrictions towards police.
Professor Kosals began his talk with pointing out theoretical approaches to violence. The adherents of economic approach (North, Walls, Weingast) connect violence with centralization of the state. The advocates of modernization theory (Inglehart, Welzel) consider violence as a sign of the shift from survival to self-expression values.
Gerber and Mendelson point out three different possible approaches to police organization. The first, professional police (“functional model”), aim to achieve public safety and security (Western Europe, Japan, US). The second, police of divided society, mainly operate for the benefit of powerful elite groups. The third, predatory police, do not care much about public interest or elite groups but mainly focus on extracting money from the market.
In his research professor Kosals aims to estimate which kind of model characterizes transformation countries. The hypothesis is that predatory police is the case of such countries.
The main objective of the project is to reveal how resources of violence convert into economic access, in other words, how police develops economic activities and makes money. In the previous stage the survey was conducted in three transformation countries: Bulgaria, Kazakhstan and Russia. In 2011 450-500 police officers were surveyed in each country. The researchers made an attempt to cover Tanzania but failed because at the time of the survey elections took place there. The next step will be to include Georgia in the research.
Professor Kosals introduced the distribution of the Global Peace Index in order to provide the context of researching violence. This index consists of 23 indicators including number of jailed people, level of violent crime, military expenditures (in GDP). Bulgaria was on 53d position, Kazakhstan on 93d and Russia in 147th (almost the last).
Professor Kosals divided possible activities of extracting money from the market into two categories: conventional and unconventional. Conventional activities comprise activities that are legally forbidden for police but legal for other groups like working as taxi driver, individual entrepreneurship or other second job. Unconventional activities mean the activities forbidden for everyone.
Leonid Kosals distinguished two various cases. The first is when economic activity is not widespread and in this case police system is normal. The second is well-embedded economic activity, when police works as business structure often ignoring the population.
Furthermore, Professor Kosals presented some empirical results of 2011. He demonstrated that informal economic activity among police officers is most prevalent in Russia (36% have additional income) compared to 42% ten years ago. In Kazakhstan and Bulgaria the share of the police officers involved in side-work is 29% and 25% respectively. Moreover Leonid Kosals reported about specific economic activities performed by police which include working as low-skilled employees, violent business take-over, entrepreneurship, opening or closing of criminal files as a service, etc. In general these activities are the most popular in Russia and the least popular in Bulgaria. As to subjective assessment of material well-being, it is the worst in Bulgaria and the best in Russia. Moreover, Leonid Kosals showed that police officers overestimate people’s trust to them.
Leonid Kosals revealed the changes in work of Russian police after the reforms. The reform positively contributed to opportunities for vocational training, wages and career promotion and had a negative impact on extra job, paperwork and working load. Russian police officers estimated changes in many spheres positively except for personnel reduction. In general reforms did not change the model of Russian police which can be characterized by extra-centralization, militarization, non-transparency and commercialization. Informal social contract between police and authorities in all the surveyed countries continued to exist. At the same time reforms contributed to more centralization and control.
After the presentation the factors of enduring corruption in Russia, the essence of global piece index, the possibility of including the other countries in the survey and some other issues were discussed.