You're reading: Police abuse, impunity sparks public outrage

It burst out suddenly and angrily, like lava spewing out of cracks in the caldera – the long-suppressed public fury and outrage with the country’s police force. 

Until recently, the pent up mood only showed in public opinion polls and studies revealing low levels of public trust towards the nation’s police force. But in the past few weeks, police have been the target of mass riots, and in some cases physical violence.

It began on June 30 in the southern Ukrainian town of Vradiyivka, some 400 kilometers south of Kyiv. An infuriated mob stormed the police station there after two local police lieutenants allegedly brutally gang-raped a 29-year-old woman, and after authorities supposedly had attempted to cover up the heinous crime. Soon, it emerged that the area had a history of sexual crime.  

Last weekend a group of activists tore down a fence around the Svyatoshin district police station in Kyiv in reaction to an alleged beating of a political activist by a cop. The attack sent nine officers to the hospital, many of whom opposition lawmakers suspected had exaggerated their injuries following visits to see them.

Then, on July 16, another crowd broke into a police station in the town of Fastiv, about 70 kilometers from Kyiv, demanding to see the “torture room” where the town’s former mayor had claimed to have been a victim of police torture. 

Inspired by the people of Vradiyivka, a woman in Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine accused local police officers of allegedly brutalizing her husband, a story she was earlier afraid to tell. In Zakarpattia, on the country’s western edge, dozens of cars owned by policemen have been set ablaze in protest.

Across the board, the message is the same: people want police brutality and lawlessness to stop. They want justice, regardless of ranks.

“People have revolted. How long can we bear this?” asks Igor Antonesku, a villager from Syriv, located close to Vradiyivka in Mykolaiv Oblast. He came to Kyiv on July 18, along with a handful of activists, to stage a protest in front of the interior ministry, to call for the resignations of top cop Vitaliy Zakharchenko and President Viktor Yanukovych.

The riots apparently cut short Zakharchenko’s vacation which officially began on July 15. He returned to work on July 18.

“If (people) feel unlawfulness, injustice on the part of police officers, I as a minister guarantee that all of their concerns will be investigated thoroughly, objectively and impartially,” Zakharchenko assured journalists after a meeting with protesters. 

He refused to resign, though, promising instead to investigate police departments in Vradiyivka and Fastiv, but warning political groups they would be held responsible for instigating riots. 

Yet human rights groups say that simple investigations will not be enough, and a complete overhaul of the police force is needed before it’s too late.

“Vradiyivka is the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Max Tucker, Amnesty International Ukraine’s campaigner. “Ukrainians are no longer prepared to tolerate years of widespread abuse at the hands of a corrupt police force.”

Ukraine has 261,000 police force employees, according to Zakharchenko, or 580 for every 100,000 civilians. Ukraine has allocated Hr 16 billion (about $2 billion) to finance its police in 2013. 

But quantity does not translate into quality. About a third of crimes never get reported because people do not believe the police will help, according to a large-scale nationwide poll by the Kharkiv Institute of Social Researchers conducted in 2012.

The public blames police for corruption, unwillingness to protect ordinary citizens, inaction, impunity, and a lack of professionalism, the same survey found, which polled 15,000 respondents.

In 2012, the level of trust in the police hit its lowest point since 1994, when the studies began, according to the Democratic Initiatives Foundation think tank. In 2011, the public trusted the police force less than any other nation in Europe, the European Social Survey showed. 

This feeling has manifested itself in occasional clashes with police, and has led to the murder of police officers in recent years.

In November 2006, Mykhailo Zhydenko, a tractor driver from a village in Kharkiv region couldn’t bear it any longer when two drunken policemen started beating him in his own backyard. He went back into his house, took a hunting gun and shot one of them dead.

Thanks to the support of fellow villagers and human rights activists, Zhluktenko was acquitted by the Kharkiv Appeals Court in 2008 and set free. 

Vitaly Zaporozhets, another villager from Kyiv Oblast, was not so lucky after he shot dead an officer in 2011 who had been harassing the village for years. He was sentenced to 14 years in prison for premeditated murder in 2012.

According to interior ministry figures, a guerilla war is being waged in Zakarpattia, where over 300 cars have been set on fire in recent years. Most of them belong to law enforcement officials, including police. The latest incident occurred on July 12, when a police colonel’s car went up in flames in his own back yard. 

Yevhen Zakharov, co-chairman of the Kharkiv Human Rights Group, says that people are tired of police impunity, a feeling that has grown more serious since 2010 when Yanukovych took power. Only 10 police officers were prosecuted in 2011, despite 5,000 complaints of police abuse received by Ukraine’s ombudswoman. 

“People are losing patience, and this is really scary,” Zakharov said.

Iryna Bekeshkina, head of Democratic Initiatives Foundation, says in part this is driven by the fact that Yanukovych has picked interior ministers “not based on professionalism, but by the principle of personal loyalty.”

However, Zakharov doesn’t think that the ongoing protests will lead to a national uprising again, like the Orange Revolution in 2004, forecasting instead a conglomeration of local hot spots.

“Unless the government immediately establishes an independent system for investigating allegations of police criminality, we will increasingly see people taking justice into their own hands,” Tucker of Amnesty International said.

Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grystenko can be reached at [email protected].