Iraqi Police Struggle to Hold Back a Crime Wave

Bloodied and short of men and equipment, Iraq’s revamped civilian police force is struggling to contain a postwar crime wave and do its part to quell a virulent resistance movement.

It’s been an uphill fight.

Ali Khalaf Khadam, a brigadier general of the Baghdad police, says crime is down 70% since late April but acknowledges that he can’t keep track of how many of his men have died in achieving that figure.

“I don’t keep statistics on that,” he said in an interview last week.

Whatever the toll, it jumped by eight Monday with the suicide car bomb attacks on three police stations in the capital that also left 65 officers wounded. An assault on a fourth station failed.

The success of Iraq’s men in blue is crucial to the U.S.-led occupation. Improved police effectiveness would help reduce the security risks that have frightened off investors and kept many aid agencies and nongovernmental organizations away. It would also ease pressure on the U.S. military police -- a group that has already taken many casualties since President Bush declared major combat over in May.

Above all, U.S. officials believe that if Iraqi police cannot maintain law and order on their own, a pullout by U.S.-led forces will be virtually impossible.

At a news conference last week in Washington, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the process of shifting the burden of maintaining civil order to the Iraqis “is already happening at a pace exceeding by far any recent past experience.”

For some Iraqis, the shift is coming too fast.

All too often, however, members of Khadam’s force -- and police officers throughout the country -- find themselves outgunned, outmatched and short of essential equipment such as protective vests when they take on criminal gangs emboldened by Iraq’s lawlessness. Such run-ins, coupled with the armed attacks mounted by those resisting the occupation, have cost many lives.

Monday’s bloodshed was the worst daily casualty count suffered by police so far, but it was far from isolated.

In just six incidents over the past 3 1/2 months in or around Baghdad, news reports indicate, 26 police officers have been killed -- including eight last month near the town of Fallouja when U.S. troops mistook them for crooks and opened fire on them.

Col. Thamir Sadoon Ali, commander of the Baghdad police’s 4,500-member emergency response force, said his unit has suffered 20 dead and 83 injured since spring.

Such figures have clearly unnerved some officers and left families of police officers wringing their hands with worry.

The contrast between well-equipped U.S. soldiers and their sparsely equipped counterparts in the Iraqi Police angers some local political figures.

Iraqi police officers “should go into dangerous situations well equipped, but this is not the case,” said Samir Shakir Mahmoud, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council. “The faster we relieve the Americans in the job of maintaining law and order, the faster the Americans can leave. But this isn’t happening -- or it isn’t happening quickly enough.”

He blamed bureaucratic delays within the occupation’s ruling Coalition Provisional Authority for failing to get police officers protective vests, adequate weapons and other equipment more quickly.

Even though senior police officials insist this hasn’t dented morale, interviews with uniformed officers at four police stations in Baghdad and two outside the city indicated otherwise. Several said they were under pressure from their families to leave the force despite the fact that they had meager prospects elsewhere.

“Every day, my wife cries when I leave the house,” an officer said last week at the police substation in the upscale Al Mansour district of Baghdad, where both criminals and resistance fighters have been active. “Yes, I’ve thought of quitting.” The officer declined to be identified.

While attacks such as those carried out Monday are certain to increase such worries among police family members, the initial reaction among officers themselves was anger and resolve. Interviews with five officers at two stations in the city indicated a mood of defiance.

“Nothing is going to intimidate us and keep us from doing our job,” Col. Ali Ahmed Abdul-Razzaq said. As he spoke a local resident screamed at him for locating the station in a residential neighborhood beside a mosque.

“We are doing our job, serving them and look what they are saying to us,” Abdul-Razzaq said.

Another officer, 35-year-old Lt. Umran Issa, serving in the department’s emergency response unit, viewed himself and his fellow officers as Iraqi patriots fighting outsiders wanting to destabilize the country.

“We know the attackers are not Iraqis,” he said. “We are Iraq police, we are patriotic police. We are here to serve our people and nothing else. We will not be intimidated by such attacks.”

Uniformed officers say that at least the Saddam Hussein regime would usually provide the family of a slain officer with land and a large cash grant to secure its future. Now, there are no provisions for the families of those who die in the line of duty.

“Up to now, the families of those who died have received nothing,” said Capt. Ali Kamal, a dispatcher at the emergency response unit, in an interview prior to the attack.

In addition, officers frequently are described as collaborators by opponents of the U.S. presence, a charge that occasionally is accompanied by death threats to the police and their families.

“It’s much more dangerous now,” Kamal told a reporter visiting the unit last week. “We feel a little unnerved, but we’re still doing our job.”

Khadam, the police commander, insisted that the high casualty rate reflects the courage and determination of his men and that these traits are an important reason for the sharp drop in crime over the past few months. Improvements in essential services -- especially electricity -- have also helped cut robberies, carjackings and other violent crimes as more neighborhoods are more consistently lighted during the night. As proof, he noted that Baghdad’s main open markets, which for the first several months after the war closed at 4 p.m., now stay open past dark, often until 8 p.m.

At one level, the Iraqi Police appears to have time on its side.

Despite the high death toll, the dangers and frequent threats, Khadam said recruitment remains strong and only a few men have left the force. And senior officers say that protective vests, better cars and more weapons are on the way.

The occupation authority’s assessment of needs over the next five years called for allocating more money -- $5 billion -- for police and other security services than to any other sector except the country’s crucial oil industry. Most police stations have been repainted and provided with new furniture, fans and air conditioners.

Salaries have also increased substantially.

Lt. Col. Haithan Ali Azzawi, a senior officer in the emergency response unit, said he earned the equivalent of $17 per month during the Hussein era but now pulls down $180. Despite the problems they face, most officers interviewed said life is better and the future looks brighter.

The number of officers has grown steadily from near zero following the collapse of Hussein’s regime in April to between 35,000 and 40,000 today -- a figure roughly half the target strength of 65,000. In Baghdad, station house commanders consistently said they need about twice their existing strength to regain the initiative in the fight to restore law and order.

Khadam said the new force is already drawing heavily on national police veterans, after screening out those who had been prominent members of Hussein’s Baath Party. Western military police units have done much of the retraining.

Veterans of the old force have faced major changes. In most cases, officers called back take a three-week crash course on fundamental principles such as rules of evidence, suspects’ rights and crime prevention.

For most serving in the new Iraq, for example, just walking a beat is a novel experience. During Hussein’s time, officers tended to wait at their police stations, either for someone to come in to report a crime or for the telephone to ring with orders to arrest someone.

Iraqi officers -- even at the senior level -- seemed baffled about what they see as an American preoccupation with the rights of criminal suspects. At the Sulaikh district station house in northern Baghdad, officers still talk about the grilled chicken dinner an American MP brought two months ago to two women arrested on suspicion of plotting to kill a family member.

“Here they were, accused of murder, and the Americans brought them a meal I’d be proud to have on my own table at home,” said Lt. Col. Saadi Razuqy Qaysi. “That’s just wrong.”

Such sentiments are born of the conviction held deep down by many here that, as a people, Iraqis tend to mistake tolerance and leniency for weakness and therefore need a tough -- though fair -- hand.

Col. Teddy Spain of the 18th Military Brigade, head of U.S. military police in Baghdad, explained the U.S. approach.

“I’ve heard them say, ‘You guys are too soft.’ And we’ve seen the way they treat detainees. Sometimes it’s get-a-confession-at-all-costs. This is not a matter of wanting them to do it the way we do it in the U.S. We’re not trying to turn them into NYPD or LAPD. It’s a matter of abiding by international standards.”

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Times staff writer Edmund Sanders contributed to this report.