Russian Crime Soars; Faith in Police Plunges

After four masked men broke into their country cottage in broad daylight and demanded $600,000, the Ryzhak family sat down together to calm themselves and collect their thoughts.

They had just bought the modest dacha 25 miles out of smoggy Moscow for weekend escapes. It had consumed all their savings; where the extortionists got the idea that the middle-class family had heaps of cash around was a mystery to the Ryzhak couple and their two daughters.

“The men were armed with pistols and knives, and they ransacked the house looking for money. We were terrified while they were there and still very shaken up after, when we discussed what to do,” 17-year-old Anya Ryzhak recalls. “My father wanted to call the police, but my mother was dead against it. She said the police would never do anything, that the men would come back for the money, and then what would happen?”

So the Ryzhaks turned to friends who knew private security agents who knew shady figures who would be able to learn what gang was trying to shake them down. And for $500 to the middlemen, the extortionists were dissuaded from collecting long enough for the Ryzhaks to protect themselves.

They bought steel doors and a handgun. They are planning to get a guard dog, and they still enlist the services of the self-styled protection men. “We did the right thing. The police would never have helped us,” Anya concludes of her family’s handling of the incident this past winter. “They are either too lazy to come out and investigate or they have been bought off.”

The crime rate for this metropolis of 9 million is shocking for its phenomenal growth since the collapse of Communist order--as well as for the widely held view among Muscovites that there is nowhere to turn when confronted with danger. Law enforcement has become a casualty of Russia’s chaotic transition, with police who were trained to protect the state from the people finding little financial or moral incentive now to shield the public.

Crime victims complain that Moscow police often refuse to investigate unpromising cases such as burglaries, muggings and domestic disputes. They claim that resentful cops indulge their anger by beating suspects and berating victims.

The greedy use their positions to exact bribes from drivers for purported traffic offenses or from pedestrians for going out without documents. The brave and the fit have swapped the gray garb of the city force to work for private security firms that protect banks, prosperous companies and the capital’s burgeoning ranks of nouveaux riches.

And the committed and conscientious are being driven out by corrupt superiors and a pervasive sense of hopelessness that police work will ever be cause for pride.

“People are afraid of the police. As children, when we misbehaved, our mothers threatened to hand us over to the cops,” says newspaper columnist Alexander Minkin, who has written extensively on the failings of Moscow law enforcement.

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Fear and distrust of police date back decades, Minkin says, noting that Russia’s law bodies were established to protect those in power and refined under dictator Josef Stalin into instruments of terror.

“The police and the KGB worked very closely together during the Communist era, and their goals were not to protect people,” Minkin explains. “On the contrary, if you fell into their hands there was no salvation. They were the ultimate authority, and there was nowhere and no one to appeal to.”

Police and KGB agents beat dissidents and other “enemies of the state” with impunity. Anyone labeled a traitor or a hooligan by the enforcement bodies could be jailed without pretext or banished to Siberian exile.

Even now, in the more reform-minded atmosphere that has emerged to replace totalitarian order, police retain an image as bullies. Resentful of the decline in authority they have suffered, many cops, Muscovites complain, take it out on crime victims.

“Only about 2% to 3% of rape victims turn to the police for help,” says Natasha Gaidarenko, founder of the Sexual Assault Recovery Center that opened in Moscow a year ago. “Many of the women who have gone to the police have told us their experiences there were so humiliating that it was as bad or worse than the rape.”

Muscovites save their harshest criticism for traffic police, who set up checkpoints at major arteries and stop cars at random. Anyone caught without his or her passport, residence permit, car registration, insurance policy and technical certificate can be subject to hours of bureaucracy at the nearest police station. Or the violator can usually escape the nuisance by offering to pay a “fine.”

Sergei Galanin, a 33-year-old rock musician of local fame, says he was detained by two police officers last month when he failed to yield the road to them at an intersection where he had the right of way.

“They were irritated, or insulted, I don’t know what. But they took me off to the precinct, where I would have had to spend hours if someone who recognized me hadn’t interceded,” he says.

Most encounters with the police have left him with little respect for the force, Galanin says, recalling how police refused even to file a report when a suitcase was stolen from the trunk of his car a few months ago.

So, instead of turning to police in times of trouble, Muscovites are increasingly taking the law into their own hands. They are buying weapons, fortifying their homes and paying fledgling private militias to scare off attackers.

Russians have been allowed to own rifles, shotguns and tear-gas pistols since 1991, and the number of registered weapons in Moscow has shot up to 300,000 in less than four years, said Vladimir V. Yermachenko of the police firearms permit office. He readily concedes that outlawed assault weapons have also proliferated.

The head of Moscow’s Criminal Investigative Unit, Vasily Kuptsov, blames private gun ownership and the emergence of private security services for the sharp growth in murders and other serious crimes and has appealed for a government decree on disarming the public.

More than 1,600 premeditated murders were committed in Moscow last year, up 20% from 1993, which in turn saw a 53% increase over the previous year.

Even more dramatic than the growth of gun ownership has been the trend toward guard dogs. “About 40% of all new dogs bought this year by Muscovites have been Rottweilers, which cost between $100 and $500,” said Mikhail V. Kapustin, spokesman for the Moscow Dog Breeders Assn.

While he estimates that the number of large dogs in the capital has at least doubled over the past 12 months, reliable figures are hard to come by because licensing is optional. But one indicator, the number of dog bites reported to police, soared last year to nearly 28,000 cases serious enough to require hospitalization.

Private security firms have also spread as new businesses and the newly wealthy seek reliable protection. At a conference for private agencies in March, the militia chiefs estimated the number of people employed by their firms at nearly 800,000 in the capital region. While that figure includes clerical and administrative personnel, it clearly dwarfs the 70,000 police officers.

Igor V. Korolkov, who reports on law enforcement for the newspaper Izvestia, says Muscovites with money turn to private security when they need help because they have concluded they cannot trust the city police force.

Internal investigation reports obtained by Korolkov estimate that 70% of the street police are suspected of being on the take, he says.

Korolkov cites numerous instances of police brutality, of unjustified detentions and of police trying to close out cases by charging suspects they knew to be innocent.

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“What kind of attitude can society have to such a force if most appeals to the police for protection leave people with the impression that the police can’t be bothered?” he says. “Of course there are some honest cops, but the majority of them present the public with a very negative image.”

Even influential Muscovites complain of being spurned by police.

When prominent surgeon Leonid A. Blagodarny tried to get police to investigate a mugging in which his wife, Ella, was beaten senseless, he was told that police had too many serious crimes to worry about.

“They tried to talk me out of reporting the attack,” Blagodarny recalls of the March incident. “Their arguments were ludicrous, the main one being that my wife was still alive and not badly injured.”

A visit to the emergency dispatching center for Moscow does little to inspire confidence.

Deputy department chief Alexander Y. Denisov describes the system as state-of-the-art, but the switchboards would have been considered antiquated in most Western countries 20 years ago. The two dozen operators taking the calls on Moscow’s notoriously poor phone lines record each complaint by hand, then pass the information to a dispatching officer elsewhere in the building once the caller hangs up.

A 39-year-old photographer involved in an April car crash complains that no one answered his first call and that after he finally got a response it took two hours for police to show up.

Those who get through do not always get satisfaction.

“Call back. I can’t hear you on this line,” one operator was overheard telling a tearful woman caller. Without trying to glean the nature of the emergency, the operator hung up. Another berated a terrified teen-ager calling to report that bandits had broken in while she was home alone. “I can’t understand you if you are in hysterics!” the officer chided, holding the phone away and heaving a sigh.

Victims’ advocates say they expect little improvement in police handling of public appeals for help until the entire police training approach is revised.

Gaidarenko, of the Sexual Assault Recovery Center, says that even female officers show little sensitivity toward rape and spousal battery victims, often emulating their male colleagues in blaming the women.

Columnist Minkin is even more doubtful that the police force can be reformed.

“The idea that a good salary will dissuade corruption is totally false,” he says. “That’s like saying that if you pay a prostitute enough, she will become an honest woman. And where would the government get the money to pay police even close to the amount they can extort? The average corrupt cop earns a minimum of a million rubles a day.”

The sum he cites is equal to about $200, but in impoverished Russia the average monthly salary is only one-third of that.

Minkin says he fears that only “young scum” are attracted to police work, creating a self-perpetuating decline in the force’s integrity.

The scope of corruption is difficult to assess with accuracy, but sources within the force concede that the majority of their colleagues are on the take. An officer of the Criminal Investigative Unit of the Moscow force, who did not want his name used, says that Minkin’s estimate that a corrupt cop can earn 1 million rubles a day “is accurate, maybe even too low.”

He concedes that at least half of the beat cops in Moscow accept payoffs but declines to classify all bribe-taking as corruption.

“What is a bribe? If a person has a problem and he gets it resolved by paying a little money to a policeman, who is hurt by this?” the officer asks in all sincerity. “The salaries for policemen are pitifully low.”

He cites a case in which passersby interrupted a rape in progress and made a citizens’ arrest. The assailant’s parents, seeking to avoid a scandal, offered the victim 4 million rubles, about $800, to ask that the charges be dropped and gave a million more to the investigating officer. The officer, learning of the greater sum offered the victim, agreed to bury the case on condition she split her hush money with him.

“Some might call that corruption, but everyone was satisfied,” the officer insists. “In 99% of cases, the bribe-givers and the bribe-takers are satisfied with the outcome.”

Shirking of investigative responsibility is far from the only problem Muscovites see in the force’s collective attitude.

When a 42-year-old engineer summoned police after his apartment had been broken into and a new television and VCR stolen, the investigators who showed up nearly three hours later told him he’d be doing society a favor by letting the thieves run free “until they break into the house of someone with a Remington and justice will be done.”

“One of them told me as he was leaving, ‘Get yourself a steel door and a German shepherd,’ ” the engineer recounts. “He said, ‘Don’t count on us, buddy; we aren’t gods.’ ”