Neil Pouliot, a retired chief superintendent with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, discusses his experiences as the commander of the United Nations Mission in Haiti from 1994 to 1996. He recounts the security and rule of law challenges posed by the scaling down of U.N. multinational forces. In particular, he describes the challenges associated with effectively recruiting and training new police officers, including the need to demobilize and, in some cases, integrate officers of the former regime. Among the challenges that the U.N. and the international community face in effectively building police services capacity, Pouliot notes, is maintaining continuity between missions and leadership. He argues that police services training is best overseen by integrated multinational forces with diverse language ability and cultural frames of reference. Police reform, he states, requires broader commitment to justice and rule and law from the highest levels of the political sphere. Based on his experiences, Pouliot stresses that it is important that officers have field-based training and live and interact with the communities in which they work.
Neil Pouliot served as the commander of the military and civilian police components of United Nations Mission in Haiti from 1994 to 1996. In this role, he worked with the government of Haiti to maintain and safe and secure environment, prepare for elections, provide interim security, and oversee police services development. Prior to his work in Haiti, Pouliot worked with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Canada, including as the officer in charge of national/international drug operations. He also served as a course coordinator and lecturer at the Canadian Police College and as a resource person for the U.N. Division of Narcotics and Interpol. Pouliot also served as the officer in charge of the Security Offenses Branch for the Criminal Intelligence Directorate in Ottawa and the director of Criminal Intelligence Services Canada, an organization tasked with coordinating intelligence in Canada and internationally through the RCMP and other police forces. At the time of this interview, Pouliot was retired as chief superintendent and was working as a consultant with RCMP.
Robert Perito, a senior program officer with the United States Institute of Peace, recounts his experiences in international police recruitment and training initiatives, including in Haiti, Kosovo, Bosnia and Timor-Leste. He notes that while effective vetting in the post-conflict context is difficult, it is critical that there be systems to determine who can get into the police. Vetting should be seen as an ongoing process. He notes that in most cases police should be recruited as individuals rather than as entities, and he cautions that security problems are generally not solved simply by integrating militia or illegally armed groups into the official security force. Perito goes on to discuss lessons learned from police training programs in Kosovo and Haiti. This includes the need to adapt training programs to the local context, needs, and skill capacity, in addition to the importance of integrating field-based training with in-class basic skills training. He states that it is imperative to build the capacity of the government structures tasked with effectively managing, supporting and administering the new police force. Training new recruits in mass, he argues, is not effective if the body that governs them is corrupt and lacks necessary capacity. Finally, he notes that while community policing can have a role in police reform, it should not necessarily come at the expense of critical police training.
At the time of this interview, Robert M. Perito directed the United States Institute of Peace's Security Sector Governance Initiative under the Centers of Innovation. He also was a senior program officer in the Center for Post-Conflict Peace and Stability Operations, where he directed the Haiti and the Peacekeeping Lessons Learned projects. Perito came to USIP in 2001 as a senior fellow in the Jennings Randolph Fellowship program. Before joining USIP, he served as deputy director of the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program at the U.S. Department of Justice. In that role, he was responsible for providing policy guidance and program direction for U.S. police programs in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Timor-Leste. Perito previously was a career foreign service officer with the U.S. Department of State, retiring with the rank of minister counselor. Perito became involved in international police reform in 1993 when, following the so-called Blackhawk Down incident in Somalia, he worked on the creation of a new Somali police training program. Following U.S. intervention in Haiti in 1994, he led an effort to create a police training program in support of a viable Haitian National Police. Perito taught at Princeton, American, and George Mason universities and earned a master’s in peace operations policy from George Mason.
