Tuesday, August 24, 2004
Radical Reforms in Georgia -- Cops
Mash had made a post a while back about the radical reforms being undertaken in Georgia under the new government of Mikhail Saakashvili. In that same vein comes a story by C.J.Chivers on the the attempts to reform Georgia's hopelessly corrupt police force.
This summer Mikhail Saakashvili, Mr. Shevardnadze's successor, dismissed his nation's traffic police officers, almost to a man, and a month later he replaced them with a force whose Western influences are unmistakable. Two remarkable things followed.
First, for a month in Georgia there were almost no traffic police at all, a condition that led one Russian visitor to declare that in the summer of 2004 it was as if the White Guard had left the city, but the Red Guard had not arrived. According to Mr. Saakashvili, the accident rate held steady, which says more about the ineffectiveness of the former traffic cops than about the defensive driving habits of Georgian drivers, such as they are. The second and more lasting change is that Mr. Saakashvili appears to have struck a decisive blow against one of the most loathed figures to emerge from the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In theory, the point-and-nod signals a driver to stop for ticketing and a document check. In practice, once a traffic cop sidles up to your window, almost invariably there comes a rub. Your tires are bald, your lights are not working, your speed was fast, your documents are not quite right. Make that all of the above. Now open the trunk. The way for a driver to escape the insistent scolding and arbitrary probing, and resume driving, is to pay a bribe. "Fines," as the police prefer to call them, usually vary from 50 cents to $10. (Sometimes the traffic police officers may also cadge a cigarette, then ask the driver to light it.)
Georgia's problems were of a type. It had become impossible to drive any distance without being stopped. Mr. Saakashvili said that was so because every traffic cop was expected to pay his supervisor a regular cut, and every supervisor paid his senior officer, up the chain of command. "It was like a pyramid," he said in an interview in his office in Tbilisi, Georgia's capital. "The police were the biggest headache in this country."
For Mr. Saakashvili, who has taken to fighting corruption with vigor, the traffic police, known here as GAI (pronounced ga-EE), were the perfect opponent for his fight card - flabby, unpopular and crooked, ready-made for a quick knockdown. He disbanded them in July. A new force was recruited, trained and dispatched by mid-August. Called the Patrol Police, it has a broader mission than traffic enforcement and is modeled after American state police. It is also smaller than GAI, with 1,600 officers, and better paid than the old, to reduce the temptation to levy informal driving taxes.
To those of us who grew up in India, this sounds eerily familiar. You knew that if you were stopped by the cops, they would find some way or the other to extract a "fine." Therefore, it would be very interesting to see if this little experiment in Georgia will work. In this context, it is also interesting to note PM Manmohan Singh's promise to end the "tyranny of the Inspector Raj" made in a speech at the JRD Tata centennary celebrations yesterday.
This summer Mikhail Saakashvili, Mr. Shevardnadze's successor, dismissed his nation's traffic police officers, almost to a man, and a month later he replaced them with a force whose Western influences are unmistakable. Two remarkable things followed.
First, for a month in Georgia there were almost no traffic police at all, a condition that led one Russian visitor to declare that in the summer of 2004 it was as if the White Guard had left the city, but the Red Guard had not arrived. According to Mr. Saakashvili, the accident rate held steady, which says more about the ineffectiveness of the former traffic cops than about the defensive driving habits of Georgian drivers, such as they are. The second and more lasting change is that Mr. Saakashvili appears to have struck a decisive blow against one of the most loathed figures to emerge from the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In theory, the point-and-nod signals a driver to stop for ticketing and a document check. In practice, once a traffic cop sidles up to your window, almost invariably there comes a rub. Your tires are bald, your lights are not working, your speed was fast, your documents are not quite right. Make that all of the above. Now open the trunk. The way for a driver to escape the insistent scolding and arbitrary probing, and resume driving, is to pay a bribe. "Fines," as the police prefer to call them, usually vary from 50 cents to $10. (Sometimes the traffic police officers may also cadge a cigarette, then ask the driver to light it.)
Georgia's problems were of a type. It had become impossible to drive any distance without being stopped. Mr. Saakashvili said that was so because every traffic cop was expected to pay his supervisor a regular cut, and every supervisor paid his senior officer, up the chain of command. "It was like a pyramid," he said in an interview in his office in Tbilisi, Georgia's capital. "The police were the biggest headache in this country."
For Mr. Saakashvili, who has taken to fighting corruption with vigor, the traffic police, known here as GAI (pronounced ga-EE), were the perfect opponent for his fight card - flabby, unpopular and crooked, ready-made for a quick knockdown. He disbanded them in July. A new force was recruited, trained and dispatched by mid-August. Called the Patrol Police, it has a broader mission than traffic enforcement and is modeled after American state police. It is also smaller than GAI, with 1,600 officers, and better paid than the old, to reduce the temptation to levy informal driving taxes.
To those of us who grew up in India, this sounds eerily familiar. You knew that if you were stopped by the cops, they would find some way or the other to extract a "fine." Therefore, it would be very interesting to see if this little experiment in Georgia will work. In this context, it is also interesting to note PM Manmohan Singh's promise to end the "tyranny of the Inspector Raj" made in a speech at the JRD Tata centennary celebrations yesterday.
