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.
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.
Chief Superintendent Dave Beer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police recounts his experiences in leading policing/justice development missions, particularly in Haiti, in the early 1990s and then about a decade later. His length of service in the arena of international peacekeeping and the parameters under which he has served, both as a representative of the Canadian government during a bilateral mission and under the aegis of the United Nations during a multilateral mission through the Department of Peacekeeping Operation, carries with it a broad viewpoint as to the development of policing in Haiti. His experience in other states, particularly Iraq and Liberia, provides a comparative study of best practices. He particularly offers insight into pre-deployment training by the U.N. and the Canadian government and on-the-ground knowledge of local recruitment strategies and requirements. The sentiments of this quote reverberate throughout the interview, "It is an axiom, I think, of this world of international development that you have to find local solutions led by local individuals supported by the local government for it to be either a) instituted; b) successful; and c) sustainable. You’re not going to have any one of those three unless it’s a locally-created program."
At the time of this interview, Chief Superintendent Dave Beer was serving as the director general of international policing for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a position that included peace-operations deployments, liaison with INTERPOL, and oversight of the international operations branch, the visits and travel branch, and the international affairs and policy branch. Beer led or participated in policing development missions under the auspices of the Canadian International Development Agency, the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations and the U.S. State Department. Although he spent the most time in Haiti, partially due to his being bilingual in French and English, he also served in Liberia, Central African Republic and Iraq.
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.
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.
Doug Coates, the director of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police International Peace Operations program, recounts his experiences and lessons learned in building effective international and indigenous policing capacity. Drawing on his experiences in Haiti from 1993 to 1995, where he served as a regional commander with the United Nations Mission to Haiti, Coates describes the challenges associated with the effective vetting, recruitment, and training of police services. He notes that training and professionalizing local and national police forces, particularly in a country without a strong foundation in formal policing, necessitates taking into account the local context and community needs. Coates also discusses the current efforts of the RCMP to develop a more rigorous predeployment international police-training program. He stresses that support for police participation in international peace operations requires recognition of the fundamental linkages between domestic and international security concerns. He argues that the international community “has to invest and invest for the long term” to strengthen police services to deal “with the challenges associated to maintaining law and order in the 21st century.”
Doug Coates began his involvement in international policing in 1993 as a member of the United Nations advance team to the U.N. Mission to Haiti. He then served as a regional commander in Haiti’s Grand'Anse region, where he was responsible for the development of policing services, training of the (at that time) interim security force, and maintenance of law and order throughout the region. From 1996 to 2001, Coates managed the peacekeeping department of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, including the management of a mission in Haiti and the deployment of Canadian police to peacekeeping operations around the world. He then served as the director of police programs and as chief operating officer to the Pearson Peacekeeping Center, a private, nongovernmental organization based in Ottawa; in that capacity, he was involved in the development and implementation of military police and civilian programming. At the time of the interview, Coates served as the director of the RCMP’s International Peace Operations program. His international experience in international policing included Haiti, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu; he also worked on police capacity-building programs in Africa. Coates died in the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, where he was serving as the acting police commissioner for the U.N. Stabilization Mission.
Iver Frigaard describes how criminal networks developed in Kosovo in the absence of effective law enforcement activity. He discusses his reasons for objecting to the decision to drop the word Service from the official name of the Kosovo Police Service. He describes the police force as functional and says police had earned the respect of the population despite being deficient in certain skills. He discusses the problems of low salaries, corruption, political influence, the process of recruitment and vetting, and the transfer of power and responsibilities from the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo to the Kosovo Police. He extensively describes the issues of politicization and ethnic differences that affected the police force in Kosovo.
At the time of this interview, Iver Frigaard was the acting police commissioner for the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo, a post to which he was appointed in May 2008 by the U.N.'s Department of Peacekeeping Operations. Educated as a lawyer and with a military background, he became a public prosecutor with the police in Norway. After 11 years in the security services, he spent another 11 years with Interpol in France before joining UNMIK in Kosovo in 2007 as deputy commissioner for crime.
Retired British police officer Keith Biddle recounts lessons learned from working on police reform programs in diverse contexts, including in Sierra Leone, where he headed the police force from 1999 to 2004, and in Somalia, South Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Biddle discusses the challenges of effective information gathering in police force vetting and recruitment. He emphasizes that recruitment is a community- and school-based process that should not be rushed. He goes on to discuss his experience in Sierra Leone in determining whether to recruit rebels into the police force and describes the types of challenges countries have faced in building more professional and meritocratic police forces. Next, Biddle discusses the importance of effective organizational structures to lead the police and cautions that efforts to recruit new talent may be futile to the extent that new officers enter a corrupt structure with the “wrong ethos.” Training programs, he states, should be developed in-house, with regard to context and existing skills, knowledge, and staff capacity, and include topics such as human rights, anti-corruption, and enforcement standards. Effectively combating corruption, Biddle posits, requires making the police vocation “valuable” in terms of reputation and fringe benefits. Ultimately, Biddle notes, police reform is “part of good governance” and must receive support from the highest levels of government. While police reform may be costly, he concludes, post-conflict countries cannot be expected to more forward without sustainable and effective police forces.
At the time of this interview, Keith Biddle was a consultant on police reform efforts in Africa and a retired officer of the British police. He became involved in international police reform in 1994 as a member of the British police force, in which capacity he served as deputy assistant commissioner in the Metropolitan Police and later as assistant inspector of the Constabulary in the Home Office. In 1994, he became the policing adviser to South Africa’s Independent Electoral Commission in advance of Nelson Mandela’s election. Following his work in South Africa, Biddle began to work with the U.K. Department for International Development on issues involving police reform, including in Indonesia, Ethiopia, Namibia and South Africa. Between 1999 and 2004, while working with the United Nations under DFID, Biddle headed the police force in Sierra Leone. He subsequently worked on police reform projects in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia, and continued to be involved in police reform efforts in Africa.
Garry Horlacher discusses police reform in Sierra Leone under the auspices of the U.K. Department for International Development and the United Nations. He identifies corrupt and inconsistent recruitment processes and low salaries for undermining the integrity of the Sierra Leone Police, and he emphasizes the need for improved funding and logistics. He discusses steps taken to address these issues, including managing the size of the police force and consistent, centralized recruitment practices. Horlacher also speaks about training and organization of the police force, and emphasizes the importance of coordination mechanisms between departments and agencies. He also discusses nascent performance and information management policies and community policing initiatives. Finally, Horlacher reflects on donor relations and U.N. policies, placing special emphasis on increased and consistent training of both U.N. and local police officers, and the coordination of priorities among donor organizations.
At the time of the interview, Garry Horlacher was security sector reform coordinator for the U.K. Department for International Development. Prior to that, he was part of the U.K. police for 30 years, retiring with the rank of chief superintendent.
Rachel Neild describes police reform programs in Haiti, El Salvador and other parts of the world. She discusses extensively the challenges of effective recruitment and vetting, particularly in the presence of poor information. She goes on to discuss the process of integrating former combatants into police forces, noting that while starting police reform from scratch may have been necessary in Haiti, this need not be the case in other contexts if former forces are properly vetted and held to the same standards and qualifications as the rest of the police force. Neild goes on to discuss some of the challenges associated with the effective operationalization of the police force, including force composition, professionalization and community involvement. She concludes that policing is a “two-way street” that involves both developing and building trust of the police and ensuring that people “understand the nature of law and rights and responsibilities.”
At the time of this interview, Rachel Neild was senior adviser on ethnic profiling and police reform with the Equality and Citizenship Program of the Open Society Justice Initiative. She previously worked with the Washington Office on Latin America, where she was involved in monitoring the Salvadoran peace accords and demilitarization policy in Haiti. She also worked with the Andean Commission of Jurists, Peru, and the Inter-American Institute for Human Rights, Costa Rica. Neild has done consultancies on human rights and policing for the Inter-American Development Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and Rights and Democracy, among other organizations.
Joseph Kekula, former inspector-general of the Liberian National Police, talks about the police reforms in Liberia that the United Nations Police undertook under the 2003 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. He discusses the process of rank restructuring and its contribution in demilitarizing the police. He points out the role of the Change Management Committee that combined local and U.N. police in developing guidelines for recruitment, vetting and other procedures. In their efforts to professionalize the police, Kekula describes the challenges they encountered, including inadequate human resource capacity, lack of operational equipment and materials, and poor public relations. As part of the solutions, he explains how Community Policing Forums changed the police’s image and boosted public confidence. He also discusses the government’s agreement to raise police salaries in a bid to increase manpower and the need for a population census to determine the number of police required in the country.
At the time of this interview, Joseph Kekula was the former inspector-general of the Liberian National Police. He specialized in VIP protection and worked in the presidential mansion. He came up through the ranks to become a colonel. During the transitional government from 2003 to 2005, Kekula served as a deputy director for police administration.