In Russia, Crime Without Punishment

In most countries, a cop’s job is to catch robbers. But Russians are beginning to wonder if that is the case in their crime-ridden homeland, where officers often are as likely to be working for mafia bosses as putting them behind bars.

When a notorious don was killed in a drive-by shooting here this year--under the noses of his burly bodyguards--what shocked ordinary people most was not the already commonplace juxtaposition of a snowy street, a flashy BMW and a bloody corpse. Nor was it the daring of the mystery assassins’ choice of venue--right by police headquarters.

What appalled them was the discovery that the bodyguards were policemen.

The police commandos, from an elite assault group, had been subcontracted out by their Interior Ministry bosses to work on the side for a company that, it emerged, was controlled by “Naum,” the head of the infamous Koptsevo gang in northern Moscow.

When they learned who their client had been, the police officers were so furious that 40 of them wrote in protest to Interior Minister Anatoly S. Kulikov and published their letter in the Kommersant Daily newspaper. But they were motivated not by moral outrage over misuse of their law-and-order expertise but by anger that they had not earned as much in the deal as their desk-bound superiors.

“Rank-and-file servicemen risked their lives for peanuts, while their superiors raked in millions of rubles,” they complained.

Naum’s unsavory activities had been described in lurid detail in sensational media exposes of the Russian mafia. Kommersant Daily said the Koptsevo gang worked hand-in-glove with police and published a photocopy of a police identification card issued to another gang member to prove its point.

But Interior Ministry bosses claim they had no idea they were working for the enemy, said Moscow police spokesman Andrei P. Kiselev. In any case, he said, because Naum was never brought to trial, “officially he’s not a criminal and we shouldn’t be blamed for protecting a criminal.”

“Of course our guys put their foot in it,” Kiselev said. “But you must have some consideration for the police, because our salaries have not been raised since 1995 and we only get around a million [rubles, or $200] a month. So you should think twice about blaming us for something like this.”

The officers involved will be disciplined, Kiselev added, but only for a technicality. They had overstepped their legal contract with the firm by providing extra protection to its boss, accompanying him on his fateful ride past police headquarters. “It’s a very ugly story from the moral point of view, I agree. But officially it’s all clean. There was a technical violation of the contract, and that’s it,” Kiselev said.

The insouciance with which law enforcement agencies ignore evidence that their own officers are working in organized crime has eroded public confidence in police officers’ ability, or desire, to do their job. A survey commissioned for Russian television in March indicated that only 13% of Russians now trust the police; the rest believe that their country’s cops and robbers have joined forces and are conspiring to cheat the common man of justice.

In recognition of this, anchors from Russia’s three main television channels conducted a prime-time debate in March, “Crime Without Punishment.” The three broadcasters invited Kulikov, Prosecutor-General Yuri I. Skuratov and Nikolai D. Kovalev, head of the FSB federal security police, to face an angry panel of reporters and victims of police neglect. They planned to grill the law-and-order bosses on why Russian mafia activity has mushroomed--with the apparent complicity of police, government and prosecutors--while crimes against ordinary people go unpunished.

None of the law enforcement chiefs bothered to show up. Instead, they sent their deputies, a trio of sleek, blustering men in uniform.

Between questions, the broadcasters aired clips on several stalled police investigations into what are widely believed to be abuses of authority by the country’s elite, including the unsolved murders of journalists killed while investigating government corruption.

The three stand-ins fidgeted through the clips, shuffled as a woman wept over the unexplained death of her son after torture in police custody, and hectored and lectured interviewers instead of giving straight answers to their questions.

“The surveys we do inside our ministry show public confidence in us is growing,” Deputy Interior Minister Vladimir I. Kolechnikov asserted. But he failed to convince his audience.

Dmitry Mrad, editor of the weekly Novaya Gazeta, told him, “I get the feeling that when you talk about waging war on the mafia, all you’re really doing is chasing your own tails.”

Sixty percent of victims of serious crimes don’t bother to report them to the police--a figure cited by the Social Center for Joint Reform of Criminal Justice. Perhaps that’s because although police staff numbers have grown 60% in the last five years, only half of them are fully trained and fewer than a third have a solid three years’ experience.

Or perhaps it’s because cops are likely to turn out to be robbers themselves, as a story in the mass-market Moskovsky Komsomolets daily illustrates.

Last month, police rushed to investigate a burglar alarm at a central Moscow apartment. As Senior Sgt. Nikolai Malenok chased the miscreants down the street, one opened fire on him, wounding him in the thigh. He shot back but missed. The gunman returned, shot Malenok at close range in the chest and took his pistol. Then the gunman flagged down a passing car and drove off. The man was later arrested with Malenok’s pistol still on him.

But to the horror of the pursuing police, the criminal turned out to be one of their own--a special lieutenant of a unit of the Directorate for the Fight Against Organized Crime in the city of Ryazan. He had been sent to Moscow for training.

“Pay for our police? No way. The police protect bandits,” Russia’s top corruption-busting journalist, Alexander Minkin, wrote in the most recent edition of Novaya Gazeta. Minkin himself escaped a murder attempt last year. The police have done little to trace his mystery assailants.

Minkin’s latest attack on the sleazy status quo--an analysis of why it does his compatriots no good to pay their taxes--came back to the killing of Naum and the embarrassing fact that the mafioso’s killers easily gave the 19 moonlighting police bodyguards the slip. The killers have not been caught.