President Petro Poroshenko signed the law on national police giving the new patrol units in Kyiv and eight other cities where they are being formed legislative backing on Aug. 4. Kyiv’s new police force was sworn in on July 4 as part of the Interior Ministry’s pilot project to reform the nation’s corrupt police force. And it was certainly a busy month.
They received
at least 46,000 calls, and registered 3,632 car accidents. They also reduced
the time to reach an accident or crime scene to less than 10 minutes, while it
took roughly 30 minutes for the old
militsiya
police at the same time last year.
The police
numbers 2,000 officers and operate together with the old militsiya.
Oleksandr
Fatsevych, head of the new Kyiv patrol police, said citizens started to call
police more often and the number of monthly recorded accidents has increased
62.6 percent since July 4. Before the new patrol units hit the streets, some
2,000 reports were recorded daily, while sometimes doubles to up to 4,000.
Whereas the
old police force was often seen as protecting and serving the authorities,
rather than the public, the new appear to have quickly gained the public’s
trust. This attribute is the main criterion of their work, according to
Fatsevych.
During the
month, they pulled over the cars of lawmakers as well as other traffic
violators and often posted their reports to their official pages in social
networks.
On July 16,
Volodymyr Parasyuk, Ukraine’s independent lawmaker was stopped by the police as
he ran through a red light. He was obliged to pay a fine of Hr 435 ($20).
Later,
however, Parasyuk wrote on his Facebook page that he had violated traffic
regulations in order to test the police officers.
“By this
experiment we wanted to show that the new police officers are honest people and
all are equal before the law,” he said.
On Aug. 3,
police detained a woman who parked her vehicle at a bus stop in the Desniansky district
of Kyiv
. The woman tried to leave scene driving right through two
officers who tried to block her way. A video recorded and uploaded by a witness
shows one of the officers throwing himself on the hood of the car trying to stop it.
The video shows the woman trying to leave scene driving right through two police officers on Aug. 3.
It was eventually blocked by another car and the driver was arrested.
In the video she is seen trying to kick the officer with the high heels of her
shoes as she is walked to the patrol car with hands behind her back.
Sometimes,
the police officers have to deal with amusing incidents.
One
newcomer to the Kyiv police, Mykhailo Kindrakevych, blogs about his experiences
as a police officer on his Facebook page. On July 22 he wrote that the police
received a call from a nine-year-old boy who was beaten by a 10-year-old one.
“There were
even more strange situations: once four men were running without their underwear
at night; another time a man poisoned his neighbor’s potatoes on the balcony,”
Kindrakevych said.
While the
new police have received high marks from the citizenry, their superiors believe
there is room for improvement.
Twelve patrol
police officers also were fired since July 4, according to First Deputy Interior
Minister Eka Zguladze.
“There were
serious grounds for dismissal in four cases,” Zguladze was quoted as saying.
“One of the patrol officers didn’t behave when he spoke to a man on Khreshchatyk
Street. We are not proud of it. A few officers have been dismissed for falling asleep
on duty.”
New
recruits are currently being trained in Lviv, Odesa and Kharkiv. Applications
are being accepted in Zakarpattya, Dnipropetrovsk and Mykolayiv. While
Khmelnytsky and Lutsk will soon start accepting applications from recruits.
Kyiv Post staff writer Olena Goncharova can be
reached at
[email protected].
