Haiti’s Police Work Through Growing Pains

Armed with .45s, high school diplomas and four months of U.N. training, members of the year-old Haitian civilian police force are tested daily on the dusty streets of the sprawling Cite Soleil slum.

Gang members with AK-47s could lurk in any shack. The bulging pocket on any passerby’s torn pants could hide a .357 magnum.

“People here just laugh at us and our little handguns,” said one nervous young officer, returning to the new concrete-block station house after a foot patrol.

The rookie cops here--and they are all rookies--are so jumpy and green that they sometimes overreact, as they did in November, when a police officer arguing with a driver fired into a bus, accidentally killing a 10-year-old girl.

U.N. troops had to be called in to quell the ensuing riot. By the time order was restored, the mob had burned the police station to the ground.

U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali cited the incident last month in explaining why a 2,378-member international contingent--including 300 civilian police and 1,600 soldiers, none Americans--should stay in Haiti after the pullout that had been scheduled for last week.

In asking the Security Council to grant the U.N. mission in Haiti a six-month extension, he noted that “this young police force needs support for a while longer.” The council voted Thursday to renew the mission for four months, with 300 civilian police and 1,200 troops.

But many observers worry about how much longer the police will need the support.

Like Haiti, El Salvador--after four years of civilian control and $20 million in U.S. aid--still suffers from a dearth of police experience and leadership, according to international think tanks and the United Nations. A serious lack of equipment, postwar crime waves and the constant temptation to slip back into habits of corruption, violence and political control plague the new civilian police in both countries, experts say.

Haitian police even need training in driving, the U.N. report said.

Such problems show the difficulties of developing civilian police from scratch in countries where such forces traditionally have been the branch of the military most often used for repression.

“In both cases, you are trying to create a whole new police force to replace a discredited, military, repressive police force,” said Reed Brody, a consultant to the Haitian government who was the U.N. human rights director in El Salvador. “The idea is to create a new civilian police force that would protect people as opposed to repressing them.”

The experiments are being watched with trepidation and eagerness in neighboring countries. Honduras, particularly, is reevaluating the role of its armed forces. Changes are expected in the Dominican Republic after elections this year to end decades of military rule.

Spain and Chile replaced military police with civilians in the 1970s and early this decade, respectively, as part of their return to democracy. But those transitions were gradual and controlled domestically.

In Haiti and El Salvador--and in Panama, after the U.S. invasion that overthrew Gen. Manuel A. Noriega in 1989--the switch was all but immediate and largely controlled by international organizations. The resulting mix of hope and hype created such high expectations that the new civilian police forces were almost certain to fall short.

In El Salvador, “we believe that the National Civilian Police is the most important achievement of the peace accords,” said Victoria Marina de Aviles, the attorney general for human rights.

For the first time, Salvadoran police would have to meet minimum academic standards and have records free of human rights abuses. The majority--60%--would be people who had no involvement with either the armed forces or the guerrillas.

In Haiti, said Mike Peck, the police training center manager, “we wanted the new police to be the foundation of a new society, where things were done based on merit rather than loyalty to certain strongmen.”

Preparing the first class of civilian police was a herculean effort in El Salvador and Haiti.

“For a period of four months, this was the largest police training academy in this corner of the galaxy,” Peck said. “We had 3,000 cadets in training at once.”

El Salvador trained 9,000 new police officers in less than three years. The training that cadets receive is excellent, experts say.

But it is no substitute for experience, and the police and the public have paid dearly for the lack of that.

In the past two years, 90 Salvadoran police officers have been killed--0.5% of the force per year, more than 20 times the rate for U.S. forces. The public has seen the inexperience of police in their performance in high-pressure situations, particularly crowd control.

Last month, Haitian police killed two people and wounded 50 when they fired into a crowd during Carnival celebrations, the most recent in a series of police shootings during public gatherings.

El Salvador’s riot squad is being reorganized after police killed two demonstrators in separate incidents last year. As part of the reorganization, riot squad members took psychological tests to determine their fitness for crowd control duties; 40% of them failed.

“Riot police must have a variety of qualifications, such as being controlled but brave,” said David Escobar, one of four citizens on the newly formed Public Safety Council.

Public confidence in the new police force has turned to disillusionment. Referring to the police, the U.N. report on Haiti warns: “They are still looked on favorably in most places by their fellow citizens, but their image has been deteriorating.”

Similarly, polls show that a year ago, 28% of Salvadorans believed that the police were the institution that best defended human rights. By September, the police had dropped to fourth place and 7.9%.

Government officials are as much to blame for those numbers as the police because they have refused to address social problems until they erupt into violence, Aviles said. Then they send the police to stop the riot.

“The biggest concern is the absence of competent senior officers and overall leadership,” according to the U.N. report on Haiti. “Lack of leadership has also affected the discipline of the force, leading to incorrect behavior, which in turn undermine its authority and respect for it.”

But efforts to try to provide seasoned officers have been controversial and counterproductive.

“One of the key problems is that, because it takes a while to train people from scratch, there is pressure for the interim to bring back the old, authoritarian forces,” said George Vickers, director of the Washington Office on Latin America, a U.S. think tank that has studied the issue extensively.

Over the objections of many Haitians, 130 military police were allowed to join the new 5,000-member force. More worrisome, say international sources, are indications that former military officers are being placed in high-level posts.

“These are guys who were real abusers of power,” one source said, “and now they are back because of family and political affiliations.”

Even when investigators have the best intentions, the lack of expertise shows, said Brody, who is helping the Haitian government investigate human rights abuses that occurred during the three-year military dictatorship that ended in 1994 when U.S. troops invaded the island nation and restored Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the elected president, to power.

To complicate matters, the inexperienced police are facing crime waves. “We are fighting crime in a postwar era that has left a tremendous delinquency, and, on the other hand, we are organizing a new corps,” Salvadoran Police Director Rodrigo Avila said.

Under such pressure, police can be tempted to return to familiar, authoritarian ways, such as the Cite Soleil rookie’s plea for a more powerful weapon.

“We’ve seen the new police adopting some of the attitudes of their predecessors, such as riding with their guns drawn,” one U.N. official in Haiti said. “We have to overcome the culture and inbred attitudes of the past.”

One important indicator that this is happening: Citizens are now openly lodging complaints against the police, observers say.

“When there have been problems, there have been changes,” Escobar said. “Before, honest citizens were afraid of the police. Now citizens can criticize the police.”

Darling was recently on assignment in Haiti.