Lucas Kusima talks about reforms in policing prompted by the change in Tanzania's government leadership in 2005. He describes the shortfalls in recruitment of local police and the need to change training methods to improve professionalism and a greater understanding of human rights. He talks about the difficulties of modernizing equipment and information technologies when funding must come from the communities the police serve. Kusima discusses the medium-term strategic plan for reform that is part of the national vision for development by 2025 and the methods used to compile a reform document that is inclusive and builds citizen confidence. He describes the unexpected obstacles of trying to bring about reform such as the need to amend laws and the resistance to change by the police force. Financing remains the biggest challenge, he says. The foremost achievement was building the confidence of the public, and he talks about ways public confidence in community policing is measured.
Oliver Somasa gives an account of the police reforms in Sierra Leone. The main priorities during the reform process were boosting the police’s crowd-control capacity; strengthening their ability to fight organized crime, drug-trafficking and money laundering; and developing airport and border authority to maximize tax revenues. Somasa talks about police vetting, recruitment, rank restructuring due to lack of distinct functions across positions, and training. He highlights the role of capacity building in professionalizing the police. International donors and organizations like the United Nations participated in providing the necessary working tools for the reforms. Somasa describes the challenges raised by such outside organizations, including administrative bottlenecks and the shuffling of advisers that affected the continuity of operations. Somasa also explains the establishment of Family Support Units, which increased the reporting of domestic crimes as people gained more confidence in the police. In addition, he describes the department in charge of complaints, discipline, and internal investigation, which enabled the public to report complaints and to seek redress. For the analysis of the implemented reforms, Somasa highlights the importance of the monitoring and evaluation department, the change-management board, and public-perception surveys that were conducted by independent bodies.
Transcript
Profile
At the time of this interview, Oliver Somasa was the deputy inspector-general of police in Sierra Leone. He joined the Sierra Leone Police in 1987 as an officer cadet. He later underwent training in drug-enforcement analysis in Vienna and on returning, he became the head of the anti-narcotics squad in the Criminal Investigation Department.
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.
At the time of this interview, Susan Nina Carroll was a senior program adviser working as a consultant for Military Professional Resources Inc. on behalf of the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program of the U.S. Department of Justice. She began her career in the U.S. military, moving to a private security firm in 1992, where she worked as director of training. She left to work in the training department of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, and when the games began in 1996 she ran security for the Olympics at the Atlanta airport, where participants arrived. After the Olympics, she accepted several contracts from ICITAP to train police in Haiti and Croatia before beginning her work in Bosnia.
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.
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Profile
At the time of this interview, Jim Tillman worked in Bosnia-Herzegovina as a program manager for the U.S. Department of Justice’s International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program. He began his career as a plant manager for the American textile firm Brown Group, after which he became a police officer in the U.S. His first international policing experience was in Haiti, where he worked on police reform and development. He later worked in Azerbaijan, Ukraine and throughout the Balkans.
Rudolfo Landeros discusses improvements in capacity within the Sierra Leone Police with aid from the United Nations. He begins by discussing the challenges faced by the police, including logistical and budgetary constraints, and shortcomings in officer training. He reflects on the problem of discipline and accountability in the police, and discusses both internal accountability mechanisms as well as steps in the direction of creating an external oversight authority. He lauds the creation and performance of an unarmed Crowd Control Unit through the training of trainers within the police, and the success in policing the 2007 elections. He also speaks about the prevention of sexual harassment and discrimination within the police. Finally, he reflects on U.N. Police operations, and he argues that the operations would be improved by more extensive induction training, longer deployments for management and budgetary autonomy for non-executive departments.
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Profile
At the time of this interview, Rudolfo Landeros was senior police adviser at the United Nations Integrated Office in Sierra Leone. Prior to that, he spent more than 24 years at the Austin, Texas, police department, where his positions included assistant chief of police.
Eka Tkeshelashvili describes police reforms in Georgia. Shortly after it assumed power, the reform government fired the entire traffic police force because of rampant corruption. Few serious consequences flowed from this decision, though some of those discharged may have joined criminal groups. She says that the high level of organized crime and paramilitary activity that afflicted Georgia in the early 1990s was more or less under control. In rebuilding the police force, she says, the government recruited candidates with the proper credentials and training, and pay levels were increased significantly. The Police Academy was equipped with more up-to-date facilities and curricula. Prison facilities were reformed and human rights for prisoners gained improved protection. Police management was decentralized. External oversight of police activity and of the prisons was improved, and the public was given new ways to report and comment on police performance.
At the time of this interview, Eka Tkeshelashvili was the international security adviser to Georgia's National Security Council. For the last half of 2008, she served as Georgia’s foreign minister. Earlier that year, she was prosecutor general. In 2006 and 2007, she headed the Tbilisi Court of Appeals. In 2007, she was minister of justice. She first joined the government in 2005 and served as deputy minister of interior. She graduated from the Faculty of International Law and International Relations at Tbilisi State University in 1999.
Sifuni Mchome, the dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, talks about his involvement in the country's police reform program. Together with a colleague from the university, he discusses how they embarked on rewriting the Police General Orders, which instruct the police on conduct, in order to make the orders more useful in the changing field of law enforcement. The initial document lacked operative principles, it was not up-to-date with the law, it contradicted the Bill of Rights, and it lacked clear instructions on how to conduct an arrest. Mchome also explains the challenges of implementing the reforms, which included logistical problems, limited human and financial resources, the law's lack of guidance on how police power and functions should be discharged, and the absence of a configured law enforcement system to promote intelligence-led policing through the cooperation of entities like the police force, the prisons, and the courts. Through a modernization drive, Mchome describes efforts to empower the police, to retool and to provide new techniques for dealing with increasingly sophisticated criminals. An independent directorate was created under the Ministry of Home Affairs to monitor the police force and to deal with complaints collection.
At the time of this interview, Sifuni Mchome was the dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania. He previously worked in the Department of Civil and Criminal Law, with a specialty in criminal justice. Mchome previously was involved in policing. He participated in a program run by the Legal Aid Committee of the Faculty of Law, University of Dar Es Salaam, which involved training police officers and prison and judicial officials.
Vincent Dzakpata recounts his experiences as the United Nations Police chief of staff in the U.N. Integrated Office in Sierra Leone. He was brought in to help build the capacity of the Sierra Leone police service and improve professionalism in preparation for the 2007 presidential and parliamentary elections. Dzakpata identifies some of the major obstacles that reformers in the country faced, including a lack of motivation and commitment among officers and their reluctance to take ownership of proposed reforms. Another major issue was poverty. Many of the members of the Sierra Leone police were under severe financial pressure, to the point that it inhibited their ability to perform their jobs. The officers, particularly those of the unarmed general policing unit, often lacked the self-confidence required to effectively do their jobs; some claimed that northerners tended to be favored in the system. Dzakpata maintains the importance of improving the self-regulation mechanisms within the police force, as well as the expansion of the mechanisms in place for external regulation, including the Complaints Disciplinary Internal Investigations Department, which he commends as having helped restore public trust in the Sierra Leone police. He suggests that reforms likely would have achieved greater success and permanance if the U.N. had the authority to take disciplinary action against state officers who resisted change.
At the time of this interview, Vincent Dzakpata was the United Nations Police chief of staff in the U.N. Integrated Office in Sierra Leone. After leaving teacher training college, he joined the police force in his native Ghana for a number of years, working in many departments including criminal investigations and operations, and eventually served as both a divisional and regional police commander. Dzakpata’s first experience with international policing came with his 1997 deployment to Bosnia, where he served as a district human rights officer and later as a district elections officer. He was deployed to Sierra Leone in 2006, initially as the U.N. police adviser on professional standards and eventually as the chief of staff of the U.N. police.
Assistant Inspector-General of Police Richard Moigbe discusses police restructuring in post-conflict Sierra Leone. He speaks of efforts to create a unified security structure in Sierra Leone by including many areas of government. He continues by explaining the efforts of the police force to assess their numbers and their weaknesses. Realizing their poor image with the public, Moigbe discusses his involvement with the Complaint Discipline and Internal Investigation Department, which gave voice to public complaints against the police. He also details new efforts to increase community-based policing and curb armed robbery.
Transcript
Profile
At the time of this interview, Richard Moigbe was the assistant inspector-general of police in Sierra Leone. His responsibilities were to develop operational policies, coordinate the work of all police commanders, and provide strategic leadership. Moigbe joined the police force in 1987 as a cadet officer. Later, he worked with the anti-smuggling squad, the forgery and fraud squad, the operations department that dealt with robberies and burglaries and with homicide. He served as a commandant of the police training school. He was in charge of the research and planning department and the special investigations bureau at the police headquarters. Moigbe set up the Complaint Discipline and Internal Investigation Department and the Crimes Services Department that integrated the Criminal Investigations Department, the Special Branch and other police intelligence operations.
As Liberia began to emerge from civil war in 2003, the warring sides agreed to overhaul the discredited national police service. In the Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed in Accra, Ghana, the parties designated the United Nations as the lead body in rebuilding and reforming Liberia’s civilian police capacity. In a joint effort between Liberian and U.N. police, led initially by U.N. Police Commissioner Mark Kroeker and Liberian Inspector General Chris Massaquoi, reformers vetted and trained a new police service of more than 4,000 officers, established specialized units to combat gender-based violence and high-risk threats, improved internal accountability mechanisms, and began to reverse the sordid reputation for unlawful killings and rape the police had earned during Liberia’s civil war. This case offers insights into the development of the Liberia National Police, one of the successes in post-war Liberia and an uncommon example of successful post-war police reform.
Jonathan (Yoni) Friedman drafted this case study on the basis of interviews conducted in Monrovia, Liberia, during June and July 2011, and on the basis of interviews conducted by Arthur Boutellis in Monrovia in May 2008 and text prepared by Christine MacAulay. Case published September 2011. A separate case study, “Building an Inclusive, Responsive National Police Service: Gender-Sensitive Reform in Liberia, 2005-2011” describes efforts to increase gender diversity and respond to high rates of sexual and gender-based violence in Liberia.