An initiative of the National Academy of Public Administration, and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Bobst Center for Peace and Justice, Princeton University Oral History Program Series: Policing Interview no.: G1 Interviewee: Susan Nina Carroll Interviewer: Larisa Jasarevic Date of Interview: April 14, 2008 Location: ICITAP Sarajevo Bosnia JASAREVIC: This morning we have with us Ms. Susan Nina Carroll of ICITAP (International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program). I will have her introduce herself and her position. CARROLL: I am the Senior Program Advisor which means that I am a consultant working for MPRI (Military Professional Resources Inc.) and I am here on behalf of the Department of Justice ICITAP program. What I do is I coordinate our various project components and the logistics and the administration. The Program Manager, who is a federal employee, I am his deputy so to speak. I kind of do just about everything. I've been here since July 23, 1997 so I have a little bit of history with the program. JASAREVIC: Also just before joining the ICITAP what were you doing? What was your career before that. CARROLL: Well I started out as a military police officer and when I got out of the army in 1992 I went to work as the Director of Training for a private security company and ran the academy that they have. In 1995 I took a short contract with ICITAP to work on the Haiti project as a police trainer. In between that and this I worked in the training department of the Atlantic Committee for Olympic Games and then when the games actually started I took over the security, the venue of the airport where the athletes were coming in. So I was in charge of that during the games. Before and after the games I was in the training department. That's about it. Following that I did a couple of short police training contracts for ICITAP in Croatia and then came down to Bosnia and been here ever since. JASAREVIC: Do you have a specialty in police work as far as policing goes, and reform goes? Anything that pertains to policing that you have a particular-is there a niche that you work on? CARROLL: No really, I'm more of a generalist. We bring in specialists to work in those areas. Mine is more just kind of the management and I haven't really done policing for a good eight years, even with ICITAP, instead what I do is I coordinate the program itself for the boss and have gotten away from the hands-on training aspect and development aspect of the local police. JASAREVIC: I think the aim of the project is to get sort of a mosaic perspective, to get the perspective of the players, as you say hands on, so people who are actually designing, planning, implementing the policing reforms, but also just people like yourself who have more of a managerial perspective who are several steps away from the game itself so to say and have that kind of a vantage point. CARROLL: That's good. Over the years I guess I've become more of a jack of all trades master of none sort of thing. Any specialism I might have had when I look back at it, the police techniques for combating crime have changed significantly in ten years. They have to, because as a police officer we come up against criminals who once we come up with a strategy of how to combat a particular type of crime, the criminals get smart and change their strategies. They always try to stay one step ahead of the police. That's why a police organization has to be willing and able to change. Of course, what we're doing here is we're implementing major changes. So it is quite the challenge, you have to be quite the change management or broker, change broker, in order to make things work. JASAREVIC: It seems like you have a sort of a long array here. So you'll be able to give us that kind of a perspective. Since 1997? CARROLL: Yes. JASAREVIC: So let's start with the question that has to do with recruitment. It seems like in the past when I ask this question people usually look back in history and see what actually kinds of answers. How does that inspire you this particular question. It has to do with recruiting, helping national police services to develop viable strategies and programs. The questions were how do you sort out the good applicants from the less well qualified ones? How do you develop those strategies, or even from people whose roles in the conflict were heavily politicized or possibly a threat to the new police services. So if you have experience in designing or overseeing a recruitment strategy. CARROLL: I would have to go back to the early years too for that. The methodology for recruiting today is strongly based on it, it hasn't changed much. One of the things that-there were several things we wanted to ensure. One is that the recruits that we go for, we have to get a good ethnic balance. So a lot of that is where do you advertise, which newspapers do you advertise in because the locals read the newspapers that are slanted towards their ethnicity. Some will pick up all three but the vast majority do not, they pick up the one. In fact they listen to those television stations and the radio stations that are ethnically biased lets say, okay, which is always a problem. So when you're recruiting you have to reach out to all three ethnic groups. That means radio, newspapers that they read. Then the other thing is you want to reach out to women because it is an all volunteer process here. Before the war they had a police high school. So when you hit like 14 years old, your parents decided whether you were going to be a police officer. Or the government, through some testing or whatever, or just availability. Some of the schools cost a little more than others so if police were cheaper you'd put them in there. But when you graduated from police high school that's all you were trained for. So it was kind of predetermined and they did not recruit women. So before the war it was a male-dominated society, there is no doubt about that. After the war of course we started introducing women. Our goal initially was to try to bring the force up to about 10%. Surprisingly to us, although if you think about it in hindsight, it wasn't a big surprise, but the numbers of women who came out to take these jobs was above and beyond what we had hoped and expected. As I said, you look back on that and you realize they lost a lot of men during the war and there was very, very high unemployment here and the women just-they were looking for work and here were jobs available and it was being opened up to women. So they came in force. We had one or two classes, police academy classes, I think it was '98, that were much more than 10%, they were like 30 and 40% female, the classes were. But because the overall force was certainly less than 10%, they allowed that to happen. Once you reached that 10% level they kind of leveled it off a little bit and women started getting jobs doing other things and things like that so it has sort of balanced out again. JASAREVIC: Let me ask one more thing, a question popped up in my mind. You mentioned this multi-ethnic dimension to advertising and where do you end up advertising, but do the messages also vary from one newspaper to another, and also not only the ethnic considerations but also the gender considerations. Do you have to actually change the recruiting invitation message promotion if you will depending on who are you trying to draw into police work? CARROLL: None of that was done. It was a standard we're looking for police officers, what the basic recruitment requirements were. You had to be a certain age. You had to have certain education, these sorts of things, physically fit. It wasn't changed by newspaper or directed toward any particular ethnic group or anything. It was the same message. JASAREVIC: Anything else that comes to mind as far as recruitment goes. CARROLL: Of course we would get large numbers of people who would come and apply for the jobs. Then you have to start your initial screening. You know, you go through and you look. There were a bunch who have come and applied that don't even meet the minimum requirements, so they're just out of there. You set those aside. Then one of the requirements was you had to be physically fit. From that point then we took them through medical screening and that knocked a lot of them out. Then from there you took them to medical and psychological screening. JASAREVIC: That is done through the local health facility I would imagine. CARROLL: Yes. If they made it through all that then there was a certain amount of testing that was done, written testing, and that would knock a bunch of them out because there were a lot of them that couldn't read and write well enough to be expected to make it through the academy and the academy wasn't designed to teach them their own language and those sort of things; you had to already know those things. So we narrowed it down and then sometimes it was hard to fill classes. We would have these large number of people who would come in an apply. By the time you screened out. It was a cookie-cutter stamp template, but still by the time you screened them out of that then you were down sometimes saying, mercy, we need more. So that was another recruitment problem. We ended up running more classes in a year than we anticipated needing and there's a cost involved in that. You add to that the fact that the Dayton Accord allowed for the existing system to remain unchanged in some areas. So what we end up with is in the RS (Republika Srpska) we had a police academy and in Federation (Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina) we had a police academy. They were both running basic recruit courses. Now if you train 50 recruits or say 75 to 100 recruits the cost is the same except for housing and meals. But I mean in terms of time of the instructors and the scheduling of time for the classes it's the same. What would happen is you've got seven instructors tied up with a course for fifty students and those same seven instructors could have handled 100 students. So what you have to do then, because you didn't get 100 in a class you have to run again. And both academies are doing this type of training. So since the very beginning we've been pushing to get the academies to agree that one would take over basic recruit training, the other would take over specialized training, special classes in investigative techniques or crime scene management or juvenile courses on how to deal with juvenile crimes, how to deal with burglaries, how to deal with vehicle thefts. There are special courses that cover all those specialty areas of investigation. Certainly war crimes, the major ones, organized crime, things like that. But they don't. Each academy runs these courses so it costs twice as much to run the two academies. JASAREVIC: I imagine the lack of efficiency is actually politically motivated. CARROLL: Absolutely. Now interestingly enough when they first started the police reform discussions and processes, about three years ago, the locals agreed that along with police reform they agreed to go to a state-managed education system which means that the costs of the academies would go to the state, but primarily it would allow for this process of one to take over basic and one to take over specialized training. They understand the need for that, they agree with that, but there is not a mechanism in place that allows them to do that right now. So along with police reform, that is one of the changes that we feel confident will happen and it is because the locals all agree with that. They want the best and they know that the system that they have in place is not conducive to the best training and things like that. JASAREVIC: Would you mind explaining one thing. How would it be, just as far as the RS police is highly centralized and the Federation is highly decentralized so would that have any effect, the effect that you have the two academies? Are the academies actually catering to these kinds of systems? Or are the skills that they teach in either academy interchangeable or transferable? Is the curriculum-? CARROLL: The curriculum is the same. That's one of our early projects, to help them develop the curricula and it is the same being taught at both academies. The only variance is in the blocks that have to do with the legal system because if you go to the RS academy, they're teaching them what codes, what criminal codes, the numbers and everything have to do with the RS law. In the federation then they go through and they learn those criminal code numbers. The crimes are the same, the code numbers may be different. But the criminal code as a whole is the same. It would be like going from Georgia to Alabama. The crimes are basically the same but when you're writing your report you have to put the right numbers in there and reference the right criminal code. But in terms of policing techniques exactly the same. JASAREVIC: The question that comes to my mind, I'm completely new to this field so I might not be making any sense right now but a lot of people were talking about the difference between the centralized versus decentralized system is also having to do with the initiative, obviously the hierarchy, or their sense order, but also the initiative that each individual player, police officer may or may not have within that particular system. Is this something that you think is also taught indirectly in the academies or not. CARROLL: No. JASAREVIC: Is this something that is actually picked up-? CARROLL: It is more-the centralization and the decentralization is more, affects more at the upper levels. It is political. It is not the most efficient. Now a centralized one is efficient in that if you have a-if the Minister of Interior wants to put more emphasis on a particular crime all he has to do is write a little directive that goes out to his five public safety centers that says, I want you to move the 20% of your assets over to start concentrating on this particular crime, let's say vehicle thefts. I want you to ensure that 20% of your investigative assets are working on vehicle crimes for a certain period of time. He writes it once, he puts it out, it's done throughout 50%, well 48% of the country. In the Federation, from canton to canton in the Federation Ministry of Interior, each one of those Ministers has to decide does he have an interest in that or not. So if you have a centralized government, ministry or Director of Police, then it goes out and it goes across the country and all assets, all over the country now are concentrating on this particular crime. Right now it is only half and then it might be one or two in the federation or maybe none of them think it's a problem. So what happens is the RS is cracking down on vehicle thefts and all of a sudden in the Federation, all criminals go to the Federation because they can steal cars and get away with it because nobody is paying attention to it. So in terms of management techniques the centralization and the decentralization definitely has an effect on targeting your police services in the areas where they need to be targeted. This ebbs and flows based on your study of crime trends and who is out there. JASAREVIC: Let's actually move on to the issue of training and professionalization and talk about that. Just your views, we're interested in any efforts to help develop training and professionalization of the national police services, sort of training in-service as well as training prior to that. We've been talking so far about the police academy but you did mention you bring in the experts. That is one of the things that ICITAP actually does is bring in the experts for training in the identified gaps and supports. If you don't mind talking a little about that. CARROLL: Sure. We do an assessment and we look at the kinds of crimes that are out there. Then we look at their investigators and have they had any training in a particular area. Every criminal activity has some aspect of it that is common to any other criminal activity. So you can do a basic investigator's course. It gives them the basic foundation. But then beyond that every crime has specific elements or specific things that criminals do that requires additional training of police officers, otherwise they don't know to look for it. Again, let's take vehicle thefts. A person thinks, well somebody steals a car, what's the difference between that and any other kind of crime. Well, the fact is that on a vehicle you have to bring your people in, you have to teach them where to look for the VIN (Vehicle Identification Number) numbers, how do you determine whether car has been torn apart and put together with various pieces and things like that. You've got to know what kind of equipment would they need in order to tear a car apart and put one together so that you can decide where to start looking for a chop shop or whatever. The other thing here is they always used to handle vehicle crimes as an individual crime. So if you caught one person who had stolen a car they would go after and charge that person for that crime and that car. The fact that he may have stolen ten cars and you only caught him doing one didn't matter to them, the didn't know about the other 10, they didn't really care about the other 10. They got him for this one car, they're going to try him for that car. You also have to get them to start thinking in terms of why did that person steal that car? Was it to joy ride it around? Was it because he's going to keep it and drive it himself? That's unlikely. Did he steal it to sell it. If that's the case, who is buying stolen cars and did they tell this person to go out and steal a particular kind of car. Now you've got a conspiracy. So we have to get them to change the way they think when they approach crimes because they could go snatch some kid up who is driving around in a stolen car and charge him for stealing it and never even ask him what were you going to do with this car. So it doesn't even take them to the next person. So there is that kind of training. So I mean, all the specialized training, we bring in experts in the various types of crimes and various fields and teach them the techniques. We also try to look at training in terms of all the levels. You've got your basic crime, you've got your specialized crime, but you've got your management of criminal investigations. When you're doing training in a police organization you have to get the managers on board. You have to have something that will reach out to them. In a former Communist country, one of the things that we have found is that the supervisors here, they don't want to look stupid to their subordinates. In the US when I go into an organization and they've got some new equipment or new techniques, and I'm coming in as a supervisor, I'm going to grab somebody who understands the new equipment and techniques and say "show me this." I don't feel like that makes me stupid or even look stupid in their eyes, that just means that's not something I've been exposed to and I'm going to get smart on it. Here the leaders can't ask a subordinate to teach them anything because then it means that their subordinate is smarter than they are and they tend to generalize that thought. We donated computers and we put computers on the supervisors' desk. The application itself has a supervisor module which allows the supervisor to sit down and go in there and see how many cases were opened in a particular period of time, what kinds of cases. They can do a trend analysis over the last 30 days, how many rapes were reported or how many domestic violence cases were opened? What officers handled them? Which officers have cases assigned to them and which don't? It's a supervisors' module. When we created the application we created it in conjunction with their IT people. We had their input to create this application. It was their IT's peoples' job to go back, set up the computers and do the training. We'd go in there and find out the supervisors didn't even know how to turn on the computer. We're like, why haven't you called your IT person, called them in and said teach me how to do this. "Oh, I can't do that, then he'll realize that I don't know how to do it." JASAREVIC: So what do you do in a situation like that? Can you actually put them all in a room and force train them? CARROLL: We've done that. We've pulled them together and done supervisor training, level training. But we have to bring our own people in to do it, we can't use theirs. Now I can use a local who is working for us, but that's different. He's an ICITAP local. But it is just, it's frustrating sometimes. Where the real problem lies is, let's say that we did that and we train all those people. Well, the first time in any one of these cantons the supervisor leaves and is replaced with a new supervisor, it's the same problem. We can't go out every time they have a personnel change and do a one-on-one training. We're not here, we're trying to put sustainable systems in place. We go back and we tell them, you've got to set up a system that all new personnel must go through a certain amount of training. Then you run them through the various things. Orientation training or that. The next boss that comes in he doesn't want to do that so he does away with it and then everybody subsequent to him never gets it. JASAREVIC: This kind of goes back to the issue of recruitment, but recruitment at a much higher level of managers and so forth. Can computer literacy be a part of the job announcement or advertisement for that position? CARROLL: No, it isn't, but what you're starting to see, we've been here ten years-we're starting to see the beginning of the generational change. When you go into a post conflict country and you are working and introducing change, you're going to really start seeing the true benefits of that after about three generations. Ten years is not long enough. We're just now starting to see the first real generational change. What I mean by that is those people that we put through the basic recruit course in '97, when they came out of that training they were smarter, they were more up-to-date in modern policing techniques than their bosses. They didn't get to practice any of those because their bosses wouldn't handle the change. Their bosses say, well we know what you learned, but I don't like that, we're going to do it the way we've always done it. But they've been exposed to it. As they start growing up through the system and they start taking over as managers and then we're reinforcing with managerial training, they look back and say, "Oh yes, I learned about that and that is a good idea." They're more likely to institute the changes. The next group coming up is even more likely to institute changes because they will have seen some of that happening. So it is generational these changes. As I say we're starting to say-you have to have patience. We pulled in the managers and we taught them all this stuff. Many of them, they just don't handle change well. Your younger recruits do. In the early years you couldn't chose the managers from anything other than the pool you had available. Many of them were dinosaurs, that's what they are in terms of old policing methodologies and new policing methodologies. Serve the state or serve the citizen. It's a philosophical change but it's a big one. All the new recruits that are coming through are eager to serve the citizens but some of their bosses, they're uncomfortable because they've served the state their whole life but the state is not there right now, anymore. It is all the citizens that are putting these demands on them and they don't deal with it well. JASAREVIC: That's interesting. You sort of brought out a few examples of the training programs, are there any more-? CARROLL: Major change is the training methodology. When I first got here, I went to an academy class. It was a basic class. It was being taught by a professor, well educated. He had a doctorate degree. He had never been a police officer but he went into police high school. He went into police college. He became a police college professor. He has written books. Highly educated. No fault whatsoever in terms of his extensive knowledge of police theory. But for him to try to go out on the street and do anything, he would have been an abysmal failure because he had no practical experience. Even in his book, he wrote books on theory, it wasn't a book on how to do, a hands-on how to do. He would sit in the front of this basic recruit class with his book in front of him and he would read to them from out of his book. Now one thing we did learn is that the Bosnians are very good learners through the spoken word. I'm a very visual person, I've got to have pictures and touchy-feely. The major change that we did is we introduced the adult learning method here which is you tell them what you're going to tell them, you show them how to do it, and then you make them do it themselves. They practice it until they get it right. Once they get it right then they graduate. These professors were like - ohhh. They could tell students that when you arrest somebody you need to handcuff them let's say, but none of them knew how to put a set of handcuffs on. They didn't know how to do that, they had never physically practiced it themselves. Your forensic guy may come in and say today we're going to lift fingerprints. He would stand in the front of the class and he would lift a fingerprint for them. That would be the class. They'd go ooh and he'd leave. Not a one of those people knew how to lift a fingerprint. They'd seen it happen. Our classes we'd come in, we'd bring all the fingerprint powder, everything. We'd have them stick fingerprints on pieces of tape and wood and even show them how to lift it off of a body, different surfaces. We'd give them all the little powders, we'd give the super glue, we'd do all the stuff. They'd run little labs where they practiced lifting fingerprints, preserving and lifting fingerprints. By the time they'd come out, they could go to any robbery or break in and lift a fingerprint themselves, right there. But more than that, even if that is not their job, and they're not going to lift them, they know how to keep other people from smudging it up before the technicians get there to lift it. So you can tell them you preserve the scene until you're blue in the face, but until they actually see why it is important to preserve the scene, what kinds of things you're preserving then it is lost. So introducing the adult learning method of training and practical exercise, just practice, practice, practice, that was a major change in the way they do business here. Maybe I'm bragging a little bit but I think ICITAP does that best. We check out our European partners, they bring in training. They do some practical exercises but a lot of their practical exercises are still paper-based. Ours are, as I say, they're hand's on, we give them the stuff. Then when they leave the class, we also donate enough supplies so that when they go back they can get started using it on a daily basis, so they don't automatically forget the skill. That's a major change. JASAREVIC: Interesting teaching method. Perhaps we can move on to a question of integration and amalgamation, is that something you'd be interested in talking about? CARROLL: Ask me the question, we'll see. JASAREVIC: The question is about the integration or integrating and amalgamating different types of security forces or police services into a coherent police unit. The questions here are from different contexts, not necessarily from Bosnian situation, but the situation is when you have several police forces in a country as well as private militias, armed wings attached to the big men and political figures, and the efforts to make a coherent police service out of those. Is any of this is applicable to Bosnia? If you have any personal experiences with it? CARROLL: I'll give you one example, a success story. It is actually a success story on the part of the European Police Mission. They have formulated a police steering board. What it does is it brings the leaders of all the various police agencies together in a room to sit and talk about stuff. Crimes, organization issues, recruiting issues, anything that if one agency is having a problem with something you can automatically assume that others are. So what you do is you bring those kinds of things to the table. They discuss around and come up with common solutions. Getting them to the table in some sort of an organized fashion with an agenda of things to discuss, where they can prepare when they come. How are they dealing with it? What are their problems? That is an ideal way of dealing with that. The EUPM here, the European (Union) Police Mission has actually been doing that for about a year or so. It has truly helped streamline police services in a lot of ways. JASAREVIC: You're actually talking about a fairly contemporary historical moment in Bosnia. So you're talking when, not necessarily back in history, 1996, when you had a task of sort of putting together a coherent police force or service out of all of those people running around in different uniforms, but you're talking more about this present situation when you have a fragmented sort of phase of police service. The integration process as a process of bringing together these units that are part of the police service into sort of a negotiating table. CARROLL: Yes, I'll tell you that in the early years, everything we introduced here we did it 13 times. I guess the international community just kind of hoped they would start working together. They did. The Bosniac cantons sitting next to each other were sharing information. If a crime happened in Travnik and traveled to Sarajevo, the police would call each other and say so-and-so is headed your way, catch him for us. They'd hand him back over to local jurisdiction. All those things were going on here but there, it was more ethnically based, more politically based than it was just criminally based, a common sense sort of thing. Common sense was not something that was common here. Then out of need, as time progressed, they started doing these little agreements between cantons and agreements between the entities. They wrote formal agreements to fight crime together. They did that on their own. In practice it didn't work all that well but they at least agreed to do it. Then it came down to what criminal were they after. If it was just some normal citizen who had committed a crime, there's no problem. Catch him and hand him over to your neighboring jurisdiction. If it was somebody who was significant, had money, had influence or whatever, then there was a problem. There was always a problem, but again it was all politically based. So over the years, it grew up out of that to now this level of real cooperation and coordination. Now, they don't always agree. You get them in this room and they don't always agree on things. But one of the early agreements that they made in terms of how the group would work was that they agreed to disagree. If there was a particular point that they could not come to a consensus on, they just set it aside, didn't worry about it because there were plenty of others to deal with and their time was limited. So they would constantly move forward as opposed to getting stuck on some little thing and stagnating the entire process. They'd just say okay, we can't agree on that set it aside and they'd start moving on forward again on the things that they could agree on. JASAREVIC: Even this it becomes a strategic question, which room do you bring them in, which negotiating table, where is it located? Can these 13 different parties, can they agree and does that become politically significant where they actually meet or is that going overboard? CARROLL: Right now they all meet at the EUPM building. It is EUPM brokered and brings them to the table. So they are meeting in a neutral territory, you're absolutely right. We introduced, a number of years ago, ICITAP introduced the professional standards association. It was when we first created their Internal Affairs Units, professional standards units. I know Jim Tillman was telling you about them. When we first created those, we started bringing together the chiefs of the units from all over the country together in these monthly meetings. What we did is we hosted the first one and then we asked for one of the agencies to volunteer to do the next one. Then we came up with a schedule and they started moving around the country. When it got to the RS it kind of got, not intentionally, but it got off track because when it got to the RS and it was their turn, they decided that they wanted to do more, they wanted to do this regional meeting. So not only did we have everybody from Bosnia, but they also invited people from Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro and Albania. On the surface and initially when they came up with that idea, everybody was excited about it and there was some good that came out of that meeting, but then the next meeting was scheduled for Albania which meant that all that Bosnia could send would be one or two representatives. It never really got back to within Bosnia, these meetings. It never really got back to these regular meetings. But it didn't necessarily really have to because by that time the police as a whole here had started to mesh together a little better. We started having other ways of getting them together and things like that. I still-looking back, it kind of got us off track. Then one of the countries, I don't remember which one, and I wouldn't say it if I did, but one of the countries, it was their turn to host it and they didn't, they never got around to it. Everybody kept saying, when are you going to do it. We are, we are, we are, but they never did, so those meetings stopped happening as well. JASAREVIC: Miss Carroll, let's move on to the next question, actually skipping a few questions, it looks exciting and it has to do with the reform process, exciting or frustrating depending on the particular interlocutor but a complex question in either case and a question that has to do with a reform process as a whole, not necessarily having to do with the most recent sort of suggestions. In it, it has built in a couple of points or rather invitations for suggestions, for advice actually, advice embedded in your own position and your own career, life history. Let me sort of read off the script and then we'll get to that particular point, that invitation for your own reflection on what could be done. CARROLL: Okay. JASAREVIC: It is very rarely the case that personnel have all the skills they need to carry out their jobs effectively and support the process of change. In this imperfect world do you have advice about the sequence of steps reformers should follow? Are there some tasks that just have to be done before others? So basically the conversation has to do with the broader challenges that often affect efforts to build or reform institutions. In this case we're obviously talking about police services, a hierarchy of steps. CARROLL: That is an interesting question. I would say first of all you want to make sure you have the right people at the table. Then the people that can actually make decisions. You don't let them send a representative who is going to sit there and say, "I can't make a decision, I have to go back and tell my boss." Because the boss is never going to get the full story, the full discussion that went on about a particular topic so you have to get the principals at the table. Then you run into the issue of training skill levels and things like that. So what you need to do is to walk them through where do they want to go. Don't worry about where are they, where they've been, but what does an ideal police service look like in their minds. You have to have a facilitator there who is going to just get them talking and start putting points up, stick them all over the wall whatever-this comes out of my training background you can tell-but stick all their ideas up of what elements make up a good police service. A solid budget, the right people, well-trained people, good equipment, a philosophy of how to approach the policing and how to deal with the civilians that they're supposed to be protecting, how to police your own. You start putting all those ideas up and you get them to agree on them. Then you have them develop a mission statement, what does this look like, what's the vision of the ideal police organization. Once you've got that and it's up there, and it's always in front of them in any subsequent meetings and you get them every day. You bring them together. You kind of touch base on this is where we're headed. Then you start talking about where are we. Not how we're getting there, but where are we. You get them to draw a picture of how they do their business now. From there then you start getting them to move from point A to point C by route B. Whenever you have any disagreements, just like those meetings I was telling you about that the EUPM is running right now. Any time you get an agreement from them you write that down as this is the reform that we're going to institute, this is the way we're going to go on this particular topic. Then you go back to the table and you keep talking. Pretty soon you've got a whole bunch of things that you agree on. You've got a whole bunch-there's so much discussion and they're not sure how to get there, and they're just not sure what the problem is, and they don't agree on ways of resolving them. You don't get, never attack them, you just shelve them. You say, "All right, let's not deal with that right now, let's go on to what can we agree on." Once you've got a good agreement, you formalize that, right then and there. You put it in writing, you put it in law, you do whatever you can with those things that they've already agreed to. Then you're way on your way to police reform. They start implementing that and then you're going to find that they're going to go back and as these changes start being implemented, they're going to find that the disagreements that they have on the other things are going to fade somewhat. There are some things they're never going to agree on. That's okay. But if you can get them to change the things they do agree on, that's a major step forward. Right now they're not doing that either because nobody is saying, "You all agree that the education system should be changed, let's change it. It doesn't affect anything else" The forensics, "You all agree that something needs to be done and we kind of have an agreement how to do that, let's do that. Then we'll worry about everything else later." Step by step. JASAREVIC: Miss Carroll. I have one more question actually. Before I pose it, you've just outlined your vision of the sequencing is basically it starts from, or starts with bringing together people who can make decisions to begin with. Then starting actually with some sort of an ideal, of model, what is the aim, then building up to that. CARROLL: Sure. JASAREVIC: My question is also this aim, this model of what a police service is, what is it going to look like, is there some work to be done for the right model even to be posed, because supposedly these people are working with different models, some models they brought with their most recent war experience, some models hark to the old system, the socialist, Yugoslav system of policing and so forth. Then you have all sorts of internationals participants. CARROLL: Influences. JASAREVIC: Exactly. So you have this group of people sitting at the table and so forth and then you have this model in the distance, in the horizon or on a blackboard. But wasn't there some construction going into even putting together a viable or different model? CARROLL: There's a lot of discussion that has to go into what does the ideal police department look like to you. They all have to agree on it, absolutely. You're going to get all those influences. But let's see if I can break it down for you. How can you get to where you're going if you don't know where you're going is at? With all the influences, the international community, look at the EU. They have agreed to form the EU. None of them police the same way, they're all different, and they're all here helping Bosnia. The United States is here. We don't police the same way within the United States from state to state, municipality to municipality, but we're here assisting the Bosnians. So what you've got to do is you've got to get the people of that country, the one that you're developing to sit down and using all those influences, still come up with what is their vision of the ideal police state, the organization, the end result. What are they trying to accomplish. And you can do that. Once you get that group together to decide what it should look like and what it should be able to accomplish, and it's going to have all those influences. That's why I say, you write it down and everything they agree on you lock it in stone. The biggest failure in terms of police reform is not to pin down the things they agree on. It's almost like well if they agree on it it's not important here. They bypass it. So everybody concentrates on what they don't agree on. I think that's a major mistake. You can't move forward that way, instead you take your successes and you build on your successes. Well you have to know what they are and you have to formalize those. JASAREVIC: Miss Carroll, thank you so very much for your insights. Institutions for Fragile States Series: Policing Oral History Program Interview number: G1 ______________________________________________________________________ 12 Use of this transcript is governed by ISS Terms of Use, available at www.princeton.edu/successfulsocieties Use of this transcript is governed by ISS Terms of Use, available at www.princeton.edu/successfulsocieties