Russian Police on the Beat Increasingly Outnumbered and Outgunned by Criminals

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Nov. 8 – In location after location across the Russian Federation, police on the beat find themselves outnumbered and even outgunned by criminals, a situation worse than was the case even in the 1990s and one that some view as a threat to national security and others as the first sign of a new time of troubles.

            Russian officials and Russian commentators have been alarmed for some time that there are so many vacancies among police on the beat especially outside Moscow and the other megalopolises (jamestown.org/program/war-against-ukraine-leaving-russian-police-state-without-enough-police/).

            But now a series of incidents across the Russian Federation in which the police lacked the forces to respond to criminal actions both by ordinary Russian criminals and immigrant communities has sparked alarm that the situation has deteriorated to the point that there is good reason to fear what is going on (svpressa.ru/society/article/489662/).

            Indeed, according to Svobodnaya Presssa commentator Dmitry Svetlov, based on all available evidence, “the police ever more needs help from the side of society although the very idea of the existence of such forces is that everything should be just the reverse, that the man in uniform is called upon to defend ‘civilians,’ and not them him.”

            He gives numerous examples where the police lacked the manpower to stand up to criminal elements and then quotes two expert observers as to what this means. Military journalist Dmitry Steshin says that the disappearance of the police as an effective force is the first thing that happens when a society begins to descend into a time of troubles.

            And journalist Andrey Medvedev goes even further/ He suggests that what is already going on in the Russian Federation as far as the police is concerned is “a threat to the country’s national security.” History shows, he adds ominously, that states don’t collapse because of outside forces but from the failure of internal ones and the police among the first of these.