Susan Nina Carroll discusses recruitment and training of the Bosnian police from an administrative perspective. She describes how a rigorous recruitment process produced recruitment classes that were below capacity, delaying the training process and raising costs. Carroll discusses the prevalence of women in the early training cohorts, and the efforts made to recruit in different languages and publications to attract minorities. Training was conducted at first by international trainers and was considered to be effective. There were two training schools, one in the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska, the other in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Though the schools taught identical curricula, she says the leaders of the schools refused to cooperate in various ways that would have reduced costs of training and streamlined various techniques and reporting methods. She contrasts the approach of American trainers, who stressed practical exercises, with that of European trainers, who favored verbal instruction. Finally, she discusses the benefits of generational change in the Bosnian police, arguing that change comes as new recruits take over managerial positions from the old guard.   

 

Case Study: Services for the People, by the People:  Indonesia's Program for Community Empowerment, 1998-2006

Jim Tillman discusses recruitment, politicization and oversight of the Bosnian police from his perspective as program manager for the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program. The previous network of police high schools, in which students committed to police work at age 14 or 15, was dismantled in favor of an application-only process beginning at age 21. He discusses how the United Nations took measures to prevent corruption in the recruitment process, such as giving preferential treatment to familial relations or requiring that cadets pay bribes for admittance into a police training school. Each Bosnian policeman received training in human dignity as part of an effort to reorient the police from a mission of protecting the state to protecting the citizens. Tillman says the Yugoslav police served to protect the interests of the state rather than the interests of the citizens, and the old guard that occupied positions of leadership in the Bosnian police were less amenable to the new community policing ethos than were the new, younger recruits. In addition to human-dignity training, ICITAP stressed in training that the police carry a polite demeanor and neat dress to facilitate daily interactions with their communities and set up an anonymous complaint bureau to improve accountability. Tillman explains that ICITAP set up crime databases to allow the Bosnian police to track crime rates by type and region, in order to develop more targeted and better informed policing strategies. He says depoliticizing the police was a struggle because the old guard was still in place. One innovative approach to shielding police commissioners from political influence and from cantonal ministers of the interior in particular was the establishment of independent panels to recommend candidates for the position of police commissioner.