 Good morning. Welcome. My name is Bob Perrito. I'm the Director of the Center for Security Sector Governance here at the U.S. Institute of Peace. I'd like to welcome you this morning and thank you very much for braving the weather and coming in. We have more than 100 people who said they wanted to come and join us this morning, so we're hoping that they will be trickling in over time. For those of you that have been to our Security Sector Reform events before, you'll notice we're not in our usual space today. The conference level, which you see above you, has been taken over this morning by talks on the state in direction of the Darfur peace process. At the request of the State Department, USIP has brought together representatives of all the major armed groups in Darfur, plus U.S. officials and ambassadors, Sudan experts, members of civil society, and everyone else who has a stake in the Darfur peace process. They've been conducting talks in these conference rooms around us, so peace is being made hopefully even as we speak. This morning we here are assembled to discuss the issue of police corruption. Police corruption is a universal problem. It affects countries and all parts of the world at all levels of development. It is particularly disruptive in situations of post-conflict states and states emerging and dealing with crisis. The proof of all this is just to sort of look at what's going on around us. Yesterday, the British government launched an official inquiry into the involvement of the London police in the phone hijacking case of Rupert Murdoch and the World News tabloid. This is something which has been going on for quite a while, but this is a new step in that process. Already among the victims of this scandal has been the head of Scotland Yard. More closer to home, we remember back a few years ago to what was called the Rampart scandal, which engulfed the LAPD when a group of police officers who were in the anti-gang unit engaged in all types of criminal activity, all sort of in the name of suppressing gang violence. Our panelists here this morning, Michael Burkow, played a role in all of that and we'll hear more about that later. Not as a perpetrator, but as somebody who put things straight, although we always wonder about Mike. An example of the impact of police corruption in a pest conflict environment, I think we need to look no further than the situation in Afghanistan today. This presents an enormous challenge to the U.S.-led effort to train Afghan national police. Police abuses in Afghanistan have become so endemic in some places that Afghan citizens have turned to the Taliban to protect them against the law enforcement agents of their own government. Recently, a former U.S. advisor to the Interior Ministry told me a particularly jarring story about corruption in Afghanistan. The story was that an NGO had brought a group of disadvantaged children to the top of a hill in Kabul on a windy day and then passed out brand-new kites for the children to fly. The kites, which had been paid for by USAID, were barely aloft before a unit of Afghan national police arrived, stole the kites and chased off the kids, confirming probably the feeling that many Afghans had that they're on police force to simply a bunch of thugs wearing badges and uniforms. The problem of police corruption is universal and police scandals are highly visible, often when they break they're on the front pages of the newspapers and on television. However, the solutions to the problem of police corruption are much more elusive. The efforts by donor governments, by non-governmental organizations and by international organizations to deal with police corruption have been hampered in the past by several factors. First corruption, particularly at high levels, is hidden by its very nature and therefore probably doesn't come to public attention until long after the fact. Corruption, as we all know, is culturally relevant. What is an illegal activity in one country may simply be a matter of a family obligation or just good manners in another country. And finally, police corruption is very difficult to control in a situation where you may not have courts and prisons that function effectively. This raises two questions, which we have assembled a panel today to discuss. The first of these questions is what is a working definition for police corruption that applies equally in all countries and at all levels of development. And the second one is how can police corruption be controlled, particularly in situations where there is a lack of effective governance. You have the biographies of our speakers, so I will limit my introductions. The panel will speak in the order that they are introduced. Our first speaker today is David Bailey, the former dean and current distinguished professor of the School of Criminology at the State University of New York in Albany. David is the principal author of a new USIP special report, which is on the table outside on the issue of police corruption called What Can Pass Scandals Teach Us About Current Challenges. David will speak first. Our second speaker is Antoine Soper, who is an assistant commissioner in the New Zealand police force and is currently on assignment to the United Nations Police and the Department of Peacekeeping Operations at the UN Secretariat in New York. And we're grateful that he came all the way down from New York this morning. Our third speaker will be Sanja Ifkovich, who is a professor of criminal justice at Michigan State University and the author of an extremely fine book called Fallen Blue Nights Controlling Police Corruption. And we're very grateful to her because she already gave one speech this morning at the national conference that's going on up at the Hilton Hotel, a gathering of criminologists from all over the United States, and she managed to get into a cab and get here on time. So we're grateful for that. And last is Michael Burkow, who is the former chief of the Savannah Chatham Metro PD and deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, who played a large role in cleaning up the rampart scandal. Michael and I go back a very long time. I was responsible for sending him off in the early part of his career to both Mogadisio and Port-au-Prince and the fact that he still speaks to me at all always amazes me. But he has a really broad background, which includes both working in post-conflict interventions and doing very high-level policing in the United States. So we're grateful that he's here. So we have a very distinguished panel. We also have an amazingly well-informed audience and we're growing by numbers all the time here. So we look forward to an exchange question and answer period at the end of the presentations. So why don't we get started? David, the podium is all yours. Thank you very much, Bob. Good morning, everybody. I should also mention that he described me as the principal author. I would describe him as my colleague and joint author on this report that we've just published. And indeed, Bob has a way of keeping me grounded with respect to what's going on in Washington and the American government and that's very helpful indeed. What we try to do in this report is to assess current knowledge about recommendations about solutions to police corruption and to judge the utility of that for stopping and reducing police corruption in conflicted countries, countries that are not particularly well-developed and countries that are only imperfectly democracies. And this is where the U.S. is heavily engaged, as you know, and many of you in the audience are doing this kind of work and report constantly about how you're stumbling over police corruption and what may be done about it. Now, what we're going to say to you today is at the end, the conclusion that we have worked toward is that generic solutions across a police agency altogether against corruption will probably fail. And I'm going to take you through our logic in doing this. And what we're going to say in the end is that to be successful in reducing corruption in police agencies abroad and the places that I mentioned and the places we're concerned about, it is necessary to prioritize the focus of those anti-corruption activities and to think tactically about them. And I shall explain that later on at the end. Now, our logic goes like this, that there are two reasons, two kind of sets of findings on our part that have led us to this conclusion. One is that context matters, that both the forms of police corruption and the solutions suggested for it are very dependent upon the particularities of place. And secondly, that the standard knowledge that we bring to bear, that is we, you and I in this audience, largely a western audience including New Zealand and so forth, these outliers of civilization, that the standard knowledge that we share about how to deal with police corruption is very limited and especially limited in its application to the places that concern us the most. Now, let me take you through those very quickly because I only have about 15 minutes. The first about context matters. What Bob and I did was to systematically look at what we consider to be the best sources of information about the forms of corruption and recommendations for their solution. And these come what I will describe as blue ribbon panels. And we canvassed the English-speaking world, 58 countries including Israel, which only sometimes translates things from Hebrew into English, but nonetheless included Israel. What we looked at was commissions that had been established independent of government outside of the control of the police whose findings were published and who had a legal authority to command people to come and testify and to collect documents. And these reports which we're going to report to you and the findings from them, these reports constitute really what is the basis for our standard knowledge about police corruption, its forms and its recommendations. And if you begin to look at the second, and if you read carefully the secondary literature on police corruption, you will find that these reports are cited again and again and again. All right. Now, on context matters, what's interesting here is that the forms of police corruption, let me show them to you, are very contextually specific. Let me come to these. You have a look at them first. Now, these are the forms that are reported most often in these reports that I've cited. Now, what's interesting to us about this is that although these are the most commonly cited forms of police corruption, they only occur in about 43% of the kinds of corruption that are mentioned. In other words, there's another 60% of particular forms of corruption in particular places that aren't covered by these particular categories. So what I'm saying is to you is that there is not a standard kind of set of behaviors that constitute police corruption even in the English-speaking world whose reports we have drawn on. There is an incredible variety, and that's going to lead us in the end to saying we must take into consideration the particularities. Now, the same is also true with respect to the standard recommendations for reducing police corruption. Let me show you what that list looks like. Have a look. It's a longer list, and you'll be familiar with many of these. Okay. Once again, what I am saying to you about these, although these are the most common suggestions that have been made in the English-speaking world for reducing police corruption, these only arise in about 43%, they constitute only 43% of the total number of recommendations that I might have provided on this list. In other words, once again, about 60% of the suggestions that Blue Ribbon commissions have made for reducing police corruption aren't covered by this particular list. And once again, why is that the case? And the answer is because where corruption occurs determines its form, and as a result of that, the recommendations also are highly context-specific. That's the point that comes out of our reading of what we know about police corruption, especially in the English-speaking world. Now, let me move to the second point, and that the standard knowledge that we have, both about forms and about recommendations, is not only limited, or is limited, and there are two reasons for saying that. In other words, limited in the sense of its applicability to the conflicted places in the world that we are operating in and would like to do something good about. First is that these reports that I've reported to you are really, well, let me start again. In the English-speaking world, in the past century and a half when Blue Ribbon commissions were first done, there have been only 10 independent Blue Ribbon commissions on police corruption. There have been 22 others on police generally. And when I say what I have in mind when I say commissions on police corruption, there's the NAP Commission, the Fitzgerald commissions in Queensland, and so forth. Some of these, you'll be familiar with them all on commission in New York, and so forth. There have been only 10 of these. The interesting part of this is that seven out of the 10 come from two countries, the United States and Australia. There is only one that's ever been done on police corruption in what we would refer to as the Third World, and that's Uganda. And that was in the year 2000, done by a very competent Supreme Court justice. That's the only one. Now there are some, so what I'm saying to you is that even our knowledge, so what I'm saying to you is this. Despite the fact that our knowledge is based upon forms of police corruption and solutions of police corruption in only a few countries, the fact is that there's even enormous variation across those reports in terms of forms and recommendations. Now that strikes me as very interesting. The other point that I would like to make here is that we often say that the solution abroad to police corruption is to constitute glue-rubin commissions. Why aren't they more common in the English-speaking world? Why has Canada had none on corruption? Why has the UK had none on corruption? Why have you, perhaps, at all, had none on corruption? It seems to me that's an interesting finding in itself, that the way in which polities respond to this particular problem is by no means standard, even in our part of the world. And we must keep that in mind when we design solutions for the rest of the world. If it's rare here, it's going to be even rarer and perhaps more difficult in the rest of the world that you and I are interested in. So what I'm saying to you is our knowledge is very peculiar and that is something that I think people should investigate why even in our part of the world this glue-rubin commission solution is not more standard. The second thing I want to say to you, and in some ways this is more important, is that our standard suggestions, our standard recommendations for policing police corruption, assume conditions in the surrounding environment, political, social, and economic, that simply don't exist in the countries that you and I are concerned with today. And let me show you what that list looks like. It looks like this. These are conditions that exist in the countries from which we have good reports of corruption. Do they exist in the countries you're concerned about in Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and so forth? Have a look. They don't, do they? You know, you all have extensive foreign experience. These conditions simply don't exist. But they do exist in the countries from which we think we have learned things about solving police corruption. But so exporting what we know into the places that we're concerned with is, at least on the surface, very naive. Okay, what do we do then in this dilemma where there is a huge variation in forms, huge variation in recommendations, and doubtful applicability of these recommendations to the troubled world? Bob and I think there are three things that possibly can be done. One, if context is so all-important, especially the context of these conflicted places. One, you could change the context. We don't go into that because you'll all know that that nation-building at a very fundamental level takes a lot of time. We don't know how to do it. And that's probably not a practical thing to suggest. The things that we do discuss in this report are two-fold. One, we could think of triage where you look at context where we would come to the conclusion it's absolutely hopeless here because of all of these reasons and we can't touch them. And we would give some small support to those countries which are already moving well down that road and we would try to facilitate it. And then the art of this would be to find that small group of countries that are a tipping point where our support might move them off of one kind of column and into another. And we talk about that. Now the problem that I won't go into great detail here is that I don't believe we have the knowledge to triage successfully and to come up with these three batches of countries. So we then come out with a third suggestion which we call bootstraps. And what bootstraps is changing the perspective on solving police corruption altogether. And it says let's ignore the context and trying to change the context to create a favorable environment for reducing police corruption. Let's turn to the police agency itself and ask what the police agency on its own might be able to do despite these kinds of circumstances. Remember this, a police organization is paramilitary and it runs by commands and directions. It is and it has usually an intense system of supervision. Can that be used in order to reduce police corruption and possibly then to show how police corruption can be reduced and become a demonstration project for honest government more broadly. Now what would a bootstrap strategy excuse me look like where you say to the police we want you on your own to do something about police corruption. And we call this bootstraps and we have six suggestions to make and they are these. Let me say something about only two of those and that's the first one and the third one. First we think it is terribly important to prioritize. Do not try to solve the problem of police corruption all of its forms across the entire agency. But pick out your target of opportunity and what we are suggesting is find that form of corruption which is most in the face of the population and most resented. In other words we often sometimes stumble over the fact that certain forms of corruption are rooted in culture and and people accept it as part of the way things are but at the same time we know in most of these countries there are things that the police are doing which we can call corruption which people detest right start right there. Don't start with the culture and changing that start with that and see and see if you can devise a strategy to take and reduce that form which is causing the alienation between the police and the public government and the public more largely and therefore we say think tactically. Think about things particularly that will reduce that form of corruption and don't think this is what we're also kind of arguing against. Don't think about changing the recruitment system or teaching ethics in the police college or about improving supervision generally. Think of improving supervision situationally. Don't think first of pay raises although that may be part in the end of it. Don't think of generic civil society development but the development of civil society focusing on what are the particular problems that you are prioritizing. So the second thing is think tactically. Now what do I mean by that? What I mean by that is to think about let me come back to prioritization for a minute. I'll give you a couple of examples. If I wanted to devise such a strategy for India my priority would be when people come to a police station to report a crime and sign what is called a first information report an FIR money should not be required period start right there. It's what the Indian population hates most. Talk to them. We won't go to a police station because any service that we ask for requires the payment of money. That's true. So start right there. Eliminate that and you would do something wonderful in terms of reorienting the public toward the police. If I were to do something in Nigeria where might I start? I think I might start with illuminate with eliminating those police checkpoints on all the major highways at about 20 kilometer intervals where people's registration and licenses are checked and of course back she has to be paid to move on right. Some of you have been there. There are parts of Africa for example where I think the major form of police corruption one at least not in monetary terms perhaps but at least in the face of the audience or in the face of the public is is the extortion that's required of street vendors. The people who sell vegetables and it's nice you know colorful pyramids of this and that. They are hit up all the time. Indians in fact call them Mammals. A regular payment for such kind of people. Start there and see what you can do and then come up with the tactics that will eliminate that. And here we could talk for a very long time about what some of these tactics might look like but you have to do it on the basis of that particular problem in that particular place with respect to the Indian problem of payment for signing an FIR. What I would do one of the things I would do is to put up a big sign in every police station. You have a right to report a crime and have that taken as an FIR without paying any money. Start right there. That sends a message both to the people who are in the police station and tells something about the people in the population who are reporting who are reporting the crime. What we're saying here in the end our takeaway is then is don't think about systemic generic solutions to the problem of police corruption in these troubled places. But prioritize first and think tactically. And this requires as I say extensive up close knowledge of those places and devising particular plans for them. Thank you. Thanks very much David. Apple. Thanks very much Bob. I just wanted to touch on a few things following on from David and just by starting that the definition is so wide ranging that it encompasses absolutely everything. It's universal corruption. It's it's not just restricted to developing or non-developed countries post-conflict or conflict societies even though they are probably more vulnerable than most and it crosses all the spectrums public private and political areas and depending on which country you're in the corruption could be overt or covert and we face this challenge quite often. The police occupation lends itself well to corruption because it provides opportunity and ability to undertake undertake some of these activities with a degree of impunity. But it impacts on justice as we all know it adversely affects the public and has the potential to lead to a wider range of offences being committed right through the spectrum from public disorder through transnational organized crime and murders. It really isn't a front to equality before the law. So we try and address these issues and all the tasks that we have to do. The scale goes from grand to petty if that's a way to describe it from accepting vast sums of money through to just taking a simple coffee or a lunch as a perk or just to enable the police officers to do as daily duties like in most asian countries where i've worked there's insufficient fuel for the motorbike or the police car to be done and they need lunch money so they do traffic stops as we've heard from Bob to get those to get petrol for the police vehicle to actually do their business. So it's not in those cases you might not say it's for personal enrichment it's to enable the job to be done which leads me to the second point about absolute versus relative. So in some countries where there's no tax system the police pay indirectly the public pay indirectly for their police services just by doing those particular things and so overt and covert are issues that we deal with all the time. In terms of the UN we've got several conventions against corruption and i'm not going to address all of them but really we're looking at issues around prevention criminalization international cooperation and in some cases asset recovery and that asset recovery is particularly important in developing countries where corruption just plunders the national wealth and impacts on the state's ability to be able to reconstruct and rehabilitate so it has an even greater effect in those areas as has been mentioned. So we should be concerned about the seriousness of the problem because it is on a huge scale we should be looking at the links between corruptions and other forms of crime and we're pretty vigilant about that. They impact on political stability but more and more for us in the UN it's got a transnational issue or problem for us and and they seem to be sometimes greater than the national issues. So to deal with it we need to have a comprehensive and multidisciplinary approach and I'll pick up later on the tactical that David talks about but more and more peacekeeping and peacemaking now is not about disputes on the ground and doing some monitoring it's more about development and institution building and these challenges of corruption impacts severely on that new role that we have in peacemaking and trying to develop these institutions. So I just wanted then to touch on some of the triggers for corruption as we see it and particularly dealing with police in a whole lot of areas the low educational levels have an impact for us and I'm talking here post-conflict countries and I'll come back to it again and again in these areas the new police service is usually built up from ex-combatants or others who probably wouldn't be your first choice to recruit for police but for a whole lot of reasons political and otherwise that's what we get so we start from a point where it may be quite difficult anyway and we talk about the lack of salaries the lack of oversight mechanisms and most of all for us it's about the police culture because that's an immovable beast almost it it's quite difficult to change and I'm sure Mike's going to elaborate on those sorts of things again from the UN perspective issues like post-conflict Europe in the 90s and the recent film the whistleblower just really highlights the exploitation of those vulnerable groups the protection of perpetrators the blue wall of silence and a lot of people just turning a blind eye to the involvement of people across all levels of our organization not only police but other through other areas as well so the UN like others aren't immune to these things on a regional basis South East Asia in particular where there's been selection and recruitment examples and organized crime involvement and police misconduct and a large number of jurisdictions there and the linkages that they have to judiciary and political connections aren't helpful either so corruption's always in pursuit of something it's a means to an end so maybe now just some comments and observations on trying to break down maybe the income that some police officers receive enabled to probably survive is probably a good word and from experience we've we're pretty much based at any money that some front-line police officers get a third goes to support the family a third goes to operational requirements like trying to get the petrol and the motorbike etc for duty and in a lot of countries the other third is to pay off senior officers because you can't get into the police service or you can't get to be a police officer the privilege of being a serving police officer without some form of payment or other favours being taken into account so there's a need for senior management willingness and confidence to make the required changes because there is a lot of talk about making changes but sometimes there's not the confidence or the willingness to be able to make the changes required and the challenge is to change the police culture and to be fair some police organizations have identified the problem themselves and pulled back from the brink of commission of inquiries and police commissions and other things but the reality is I don't think we're learning enough from those previous inquiries and previous reports on how these are dealt with I know they're there and we've got to think more about how we deal with that there's also the issue of political interference in senior police appointments and we know what that leads to in terms of arrests and releases based on political party affiliations or bias so for us in police and probably for us in the UN police the change needs to be major but we talk about incremental done in a positive way and not necessarily in a retrospective deficient way it's about the process that David talked about with beach traps pick off some of those key target areas early and I think the relationship between frontline start frontline police staff and police leadership has a huge impact on this because sometimes they're not in sync about what needs to be done and the reasons why so that's an area that we're trying to get our UN police commissioners on the ground more in sync not only with their frontline police officers who do cause problems on some of these missions but also for the capacity building they're doing with the host state police in that regard as well so if we talk about domestic policing most of the issues during my experience have been property related offences and sexual exploitation and in those early days the key drivers for that were alcohol excuse me alcohol and drugs in international policing that focus has changed slightly and not only does it cover human trafficking and sex exploitation but it covers a much wider range than probably what each national individual country might face and the one of the factors or drivers for that is the economic imbalance of currency that the UN footprint brings into an operational brings into a conflict country when it goes there we bring a lot a lot of us dollars on the ground we upset the balance our people spend that money on rest and recreation which might take forms that some people would consider breaching laws but certainly breaching ethics so for me that's a huge factor that imbalance that a heavy UN footprint might cause so let's talk about the numbers of peacekeepers peacemakers that are currently around the world and we currently have 18 missions that we're actively working on involving more than 90 000 troops more than 17 000 police officers and an undetermined number of civilians who are now part and parcel in the development area of our interventions and of those people that we put in missions they come from 96 what we call police contributing countries so for those 96 countries the values are different so police are values based organization from my perspective and they probably are in your home police service but when you come together as an international police officer in the UN it's more a rules-based organization than a values one and that has impacts and as we've seen on some occasions our people break the rules they're not immune to that and some of these corrupt practices so those missions range from Afghanistan which you've got particular problems Iraq Haiti where there's a different set of problems but still cause and grief right through to the spectrum of the Congo and latterly or in the future Libya which we'll touch on later so all those issues for us are challenges that make this quite difficult because all our contributing police officers who make up the UN police come with different sets of values and that's hard when you're trying to to not only change a culture but develop a new one so in particular in those developed countries that we talked about commissions of inquiry police commissions congressional hearings they're all about systemic issues which run normally parallel to criminal inquiries and for obvious reasons sometimes there is a criminal inquiry and these things are dealt with but those systemic issues have to be dealt with in those other forms now it's incumbent on us to learn the lessons from all of those documents that David's talked about what we do pretty well as we listen and read what we don't do so good is do something to fix the problem and some of that is because of that confusion that we talk about in terms of the problem so big how are we going to deal with it the beach straps is one potential way that we can start dealing with those things I also just wanted to touch on agenda and ethnicity in terms of providing positive role models when placed in leadership or influencing roles within police organizations to prevent and sometimes change behavior after the event we're working on strategies that putting a woman into leadership positions has been beneficial but we've made the mistake sometimes of not putting some of our women there on merit and probably setting them up to fail so we need to do more in that area to better utilize their skills and currently the UN have got a global effort to increase the number of woman peacekeepers peacemakers to 20 percent of our contribution now that's a difficult challenge because most domestic jurisdictions only have around 15 percent anyway so that's a huge ask in terms of what we're trying to achieve just wanted to also touch on what the UN are doing to develop international police standards just to give you a flavor that we're not sitting down on this and and doing nothing but we are working on developing new curriculums well first of all this the strategic doctrinal framework what we're trying to do is get a framework for international policing and a lot of people in this room and on this panel have been involved in that process so we're desperate to get our own international standard and it's not going to be a Rolls Royce model because it can't be because there's so many different contributing countries but we are trying very hard to get a standard that we can adhere to so we're working on curriculum selection processes training guidelines latest things like serious crime support units transnational organized crime units to support police services in those post-conflict states to try and at least target some of those key areas to prevent the bigger picture happening later and if I just made a comment that we're very good we're making very good progress in all those areas but I think we deficit in this particular area of addressing police corruption we may be just not doing enough and maybe it's almost like a no-go area at the moment but that's just the personal opinion that I have at the moment so the transnational organized crime impacts of corruption impacts on us hugely across borders and across states the triage strategy that's been mentioned here for us as an evolving process and what what we're trying to do is see what elements of that can best work it's like the new process that we have in Libya the UN are going to have a footprint in Libya and we're trying to think about all the things that we need to learn about those processes so I think you'll find when the UN get involved in this process it will be with a very light footprint it won't be a whole lot of people on the ground it'll be more train the trainer concepts more about providing countries experts in country to assist so that could be a completely new way for the UN to be able to operate that might alleviate some of the challenges that we have especially in this area here but I come back to the fact that quality limitations hugely impact on us and I've already talked about the 96 police contributing countries the standard of those police officers that we sometimes get are less than the standards and skills of the police officers in the host country that we're trying to institutional strengthen their institutions and do capacity building on part of the reason for that is our pre-inspection standards for UN selection may not have been good enough so we're working on those processes to help in terms of the whole state ex-combatants who come in to be part of the fledgling new police service in some cases hugely delay the incremental development that police can have because they come from a whole range of backgrounds we could talk about the vetting process for a long time but in some cases it just doesn't happen so we need to be conscious of those things and finally because I'm conscious of the time I just like to to close with zero tolerance versus gradual reduction on impacts so for me maybe zero tolerance is an aspirational goal because we might not be able to get there unless the political and the other triggers are addressed so probably a gradual and more incremental change will bring a sustainable reduction of corrupt developments and that might be achievable and keep your eye on that police culture because that takes time to change as I've said so the facts appear to be simple our organization and I talk about that as the UN needs to improve our our collection and analysis of the scale of the problem and the impact of corrupt practices because we're not there yet we don't know the full extent we don't know the individual statistics that make it up so it makes it hard to be able to deal with we need to strengthen our investigative practices and to develop transparent deterrent mechanisms currently for police behavior in a mission or misbehavior or misconduct mostly what happens is the person gets sent home from that mission not much follow-up is done in some cases and next week they're going on another mission so where this relates to corruption is we're not dealing with the problem we're sending it away to another destination displacing the issues so these tasks require the coordination and willingness of a wide range of stakeholders not just the police and I'm particularly interested in David's issue here because inside police we can target key areas there's no doubt about that but we won't make an impact until we get all the stakeholders involved in the process political included to see if we can make a difference thanks very much thank you Saja you you're up next and before I begin disclaimer for my fellow panelists I'm going to use the PowerPoint presentation and if you sit in these seats until the end of this presentation your neck is going to hurt so I recommend that you either move or somehow just so you can see the panel what's on the screen yeah it is up there but if you want to see what's on the screen you probably need to move okay so without further ado let me start my talk the title of my presentation is controlling police corruption and it's a very wide topic so I wanted to show you a roadmap of what I'm going to cover in my talk so I'll just briefly introduce the topic and then tell you more about control mechanisms what do we typically use in developed democracies and what are the potential problems with the system that we currently use then I'll propose a novel approach toward police corruption and its control and I say well how about if we focus on control functions instead of focusing on institutions themselves and I'll give you a few examples of how this might work and I'll end the talk with a few concluding remarks of what seemed to be the novel approaches for the new ideas in terms of control so as you can see on the slide there are many stories that making cover page news they involve police corruption and this is just a sample of all of these stories the image of these blue nights when trust to enforce the law is pretty much shattered when these nights have used their office for personal gain and a higher decoration cartoon is to draw a few cartoons from my book so I thought I would include a few of them to make the mode lighter and this one I called the birthday gift so he was trying to portray what police corruption looks like without actually character speaking so as you can gather by this point there are many different definitions of police corruption and the most common one that you can find in the literature is basically saying that this is a form of police misconduct the police deviance and it is primarily motivated by the achievement of personal gain so we can differentiate this kind of corruption from the noble course corruption and indeed policing is a patient that provides many opportunities for corruption it is a highly discretionary activity a course activity that routinely takes place in private settings before out of the supervisor side and before witnesses who often viewed as unreliable or lack of credibility in the courtrooms so here's another one this guy has been blinded by the gain that he's getting okay so the consequences of police corruption are many and if you think about the consequences for the citizens they lose trust in the police but not only the police in other parts of the government as well they are less likely to come forward when the police need some information they're less likely to go to the police and actually make reports or complain about police misconduct then what can talk about the effects on the police officers the level of code of silence is going to strengthen if police corruption is uncontrolled police officers will develop a cynical attitude their respect for the supervisors and the administration in general is going to decrease and furthermore they are becoming more vulnerable to further erosions of integrity and lastly from the police administers perspective the ability to deal with other problems weakens if they're not addressing police corruption issues as well so when people typically talk about control police control of police corruption they think about various control mechanisms and here is a list we can classify them to several groups one of them would be these external mechanisms of control and other mechanisms that are placed outside of the police department itself and we can talk about legislature courts prosecutors mayor or in the case of nationalized police agencies maybe the minister of interior independent commission citizens groups and the media then we can talk about internal systems of control and what exists within the police department and here's the role of the police chief the establishment and enforcement of official rules what has been done in recruitment and training what role would appears have and supervises heavy control in police misconduct or police corruption and lastly the internal system of control itself so if we can post both of these sets together we have a complex mechanism but we are not done yet building the picture we need to include citizen reviews in established democracies and that would be a mixed system of control mixed because it is not housed within the police department it's outside so external but it may have police officers as members so instead of talking about each of these individual institutions how about if you look at the system okay first of all the system has a potential domino effect if one part of the system is not operating there may be effects on other parts of the system for example the courts will not be able to try police officers who are engaging in corruption if the prosecutor is unwilling to bring the charges or investigators from the internal affairs offices within the police department will not be able to successfully investigate cases of police corruption if on the other hand the police chief doesn't provide adequate resources to these officers we can also need to keep in mind that the system is set up in such a way where the responsibility is not shared and really should be shared across several institutions and we classify these institutions based on where they belong and we assume that they all perform the same functions in reality they don't when you look at the citizen reviews they perform different kinds of institutions depending on which a particular citizen review to look at okay so the reality check if you focus on the internal mechanisms of control clearly the scandals and the investigations by these independent commissions show us very clearly that police should not be trusted to police themselves and the same reports tell us that in the same agencies external mechanisms control are not working either and furthermore the problem with external mechanisms of control is that the focus is either too wide in other words we have annual reports and budgets or too narrow which focus on specific individual cases these mechanisms typically not proactive we're waiting for the incident to happen and then react in other words they are mostly reactive so we have these cycles where we start with a scandal then go through an investigation then propose some recommendations hopefully implement them and then 20 years down the line we have another report another scandal and so on okay these instruments typical institutions are typically not providing continuous control their effort is sporadic on the case by case basis and last of the problems with the mixed mechanisms of control is that they focus typically on individual cases not as they see the trees they don't see the forest okay and with the exception of auditors and I'll talk more about this in a minute these mechanisms are mostly reactive as well so if you look at this system overall then you have the several very interesting problems there is no joint responsibility for performing the specific control functions in other words no institution is responsible to investigate police misconduct and this is a task that should be shared across several institutions furthermore because we have this division external and internal mechanisms of control police officers and police departments often feel that all of these control efforts are pushed down their way and they may be reluctant to cooperate with external mechanisms of control we have this piecemeal approach where each institution is focused on the task at hand and no agency has the responsibility for overseeing coordinating and improving the whole system and lastly the focus is mostly reactive and thus dependent on police officers actually getting caught processed and punished and also we need to depend on the public will whether there is going to be a scandal where there's going to be political pressure created to do something about this and then we depend on the willingness or particular institutions of control to actually engage in these control efforts okay so here's another cartoon and then here we can have a novel approach so instead of focusing on institutions and what they do we can focus on the control functions and then talk about these institutions so we can enumerate what the necessary tasks are and using David's approach we can have a priority list okay what do we want to do what are the key issues we want to do we can emphasize who is involved in this task and who shares the responsibility okay we can connect the police department with other institutions so now they're sharing these tasks they have the joint responsibility here and we can also differentiate among institutions who carry the same name like citizen reviews we can say well not all citizen reviews do the same thing and lastly but this is not the least important argument this will allow us to notice problems sooner now that's what is not working with the system and here's my wish list of things that we can be doing this would be the ideal functions that we can do so detecting investigate corruption and discipline officers monitor propensity for corruption in cultivate culture and tolerance of corruption establish supervision accountability set official policies and enforce them provide resources for control control police department's efforts to control corruption detect and investigate corruption that police department is not investigating improve the existing system limit opportunities for corruption and disseminate information about corruption and clearly depending on the context this list is may may look differently and the priorities may be different here my list is organized in a different way the order is the top of the list are the things that are closest to the department that's what the department should be doing and moving further away there were the least that it's more likely that external control efforts should be done okay so let me give you two examples of how this might operate so if you assume that we are talking about the function it's called detect and investigate the corruption that police department is not investigating okay so in other words you want to know how large the dark numbers are no institution carries this as a permanent continuous responsibility in established democracies typically see that there are four different institutions that share this task the prosecutors the media independent commission and citizen groups and some institutions such as prosecutors have the permanent responsibility but it's a general responsibility responsibility for prosecuting corruption in general other institutions like independent commissions have a temporary responsibility but the responsibility among other things to investigate a corruption that the police department is not investigating and each of these players come in with its share of problems the prosecutors potentially may be interested only in the most serious cases with solid evidence that they can bring to the court independent commissions are highly dependent upon the political scandal is their scandal is the powerful voice behind it that's actually going to push this so that we can have the commission established to be to begin with that temporary they cannot implement their own recommendations then the media the focus is sporadic we are looking for the stories that they extreme stories they're going to sell the paper stories that we simply don't know maybe not be typical of what goes on in the police department also it's highly dependent on the interest of the publisher interest of the editor and the reporters and lastly citizen groups if they are the players they may not react to police corruption at all they actually may be tolerant of police corruption and may not have the capacity to actually do any investigations or let me give you another example if you have assumed that the function is to improve the police department's overall system of control that only rarely would an institution have the responsibility to seek improvements of the overall system of the auditors in the citizen review groups would have this responsibility in the current system we have four agencies again the police agency the mayor city manager or in the case of national nationalized police institutions by the minister independent commissions and citizen reviews who would be having this responsibility however this is a complex task and requires at least three steps first of all diagnose the problem second think about some recommendations and third implement these recommendations and some institutions are doing only a part of this like independent commissions they really don't have the power to implement their recommendations furthermore some institutions are in the task of examining the overall system like independent commissions whereas others citizen reviews have the tasks only focusing on a small part of what the police agency is doing so if you really want to improve this overall system of control then we are stuck with these institutions and the problems they are having like the police agency clearly what we know from the commission reports is that corrupt police departments will not try to improve that system of control independent commissions again are dependent on the scandal and the political form political will to be established they're temporary they have great recommendations but they're going to remain dead let on paper if nobody enforces them and the mayor city manager may fear that if they do something about this that's going to be perceived as political influence they may like the resources or they may like information that something is going on in the department and furthermore citizen reviews the majority of them focus on the individual cases and really cannot tell you how to improve the overall system of control so in conclusion the story of police corruption is a complex one as you've seen and there are many heterogeneous institutions with many different tasks there the reality of it is that these institutions operate reactively sporadically in isolation and typically with insufficient resources and as numerous scandals demonstrate there is plenty of room to improve the system as is so i want to talk about quickly about three novel approaches the first one was the early warning systems the idea behind this is that if the potential problems are spotted early they can be addressed before they escalate and become serious issues so the nature of these early warning systems is proactive and continuous which are two key factors when you think about effective control and they're now becoming a part of many municipal police agencies in the United States the second one is has something to do with the 1994 violent crime control act and it's called the court injunctions or consent degrees that the department of justice is stepping in and the department of justice now has the right to act as a plaintiff in pattern and practice lawsuits and the caveat here is that typical cases of police corruption will not be covered by these lawsuits so assuming that they are then that these consent degrees require the police departments to engage in systematic and widespread reforms of the police agency and here we can talk about such things such as change training or revise the complaint procedures introduce the early warning systems as some of the requirements and in addition in order for the court to know this has been successfully then there's a temporary court appointed monitor however the key word here is temporary we don't know what the effect is going to be once this monitor stops working for the court and i think the most promising one is the series of auditors and when you look at the literature on citizen reviews you can see that there are four different types of citizen reviews and auditors consist of only a very small percentage of all the citizen reviews about three percent according to the latest survey what's different with auditors and other citizen complaints is that auditors do not investigate individual complaints and i don't look at the individual trees they focus on the overall system of control they look at the forest and they focus on the big picture and try to provide feedback to the police departments so if the police departments have the capacity to learn new things here's the opportunity they're going to be provided with some evidence of what to do and let me just close my talk but saying that what we know in the academic literature about which of these mechanisms are effective and Sam Walker is the leading authority on citizen reviews he's arguing that the San Jose police auditor and the special counsel to the Los Angeles community sheriff's department are viewed as some of the best auditors that we have in the country thank you very much Sanja Michael you're batting clean up you have 15 minutes a couple preliminary comments first of all my title is wrong i've changed titles same company i work for a private company now i'm the president of cruel security group which has given me the opportunity to even work in more and different stranger places than bob used to send me second thing is bob and david misled me purposely in advance i always use power points they sent me a written notice that said no power points clearly i've been misled in that regard so i'm going to just speak a number of observations and it's funny because the the last speaker i've never met before and i confessed to not having read her book but some articles i almost want to do another panel that would go back to the old point counterpoint because i couldn't more violently disagree with a number of her conclusions i think that police departments are incredibly capable of reforming themselves and i think there are a wide variety of factors that can bring that into play and i could give specific examples i was i was particularly struck by the one slide that said police departments really don't look at the problem identify the problem do the diagnosis do the recommendations and then implement it well i can give you a specific example from the la pd where we had a very real problem with the way in which we investigated officer involved shootings and we diagnosed the problem we spent a lot of time figuring out what happened why it was going what were our problems we then developed a very specific action plan to fix it which resulted in the creation of a new unit called force investigation division about 50 detectives that ended up coming to work for me and i spent four years running those investigations that have really become the national model for how to investigate officer involved shooting so i think there's a there's a lot of things that would be rich for a further discussion that said i really was asked to react to david and bob's paper and sort of think about this in in post-conflict environments i've worked in six post-conflict countries on policing issues and worked in about 30 other foreign countries on police issues the first thing that strikes me is definitions of language really matter and i struggle with this we keep referring to corruption corruption has a very specific definition i think what we're really talking about here is police misconduct which incorporates corruption in the definition and i i think that's important i also think that we need to go back to and this was something that sanja put up and i happened to be a huge believer in it i think that david carter's work on distinguishing between abuse of authority and occupational deviance is incredibly relevant when you think about how to organize your police control mechanisms they are very different motivators they are very different acts they are very different types of controls that you must use i think that abuse of authority and occupational deviance framework can be incredibly useful as we work in specific countries and look at what's going on in a very shorthand way abuse of authority cases involve those actions where you can at least make an argument the police officer is trying to achieve a legitimate government objective a legitimate police objective so when you get into an excessive force case it's not a corruption case the police officer in getting a personal benefit 99.9 percent of the time the police officer is you know end of a car chase uses excessive force extra-digital killing arguably there's some kind of a governmental or a police goal as opposed to occupational deviance where the police officer is trying to get some kind of a personal benefit and i think it's it's really important to think about those the definitions and also the context um two other definitions that i think are incredibly relevant when we talk about police what we're talking about is controlling behavior that's what police discipline that's what police internal affairs that's what it's all about how do i get police officers to behave in a way that i'd like them to behave and when you're thinking about the control mechanism you have to step back and look at the misconducts you're addressing and another key framework for this is is it malfeasance did the officer intentionally decide to commit an improper act or is it misfeasance is the officer trying to do something that's okay but they did it badly so i go to arrest david bailey and i can legitimately arrest david bailey and i improperly use force or i improperly search something i'm not doing that consciously that's a misfeasance versus a malfeasance on the other hand if i go to make a false case or i'm trying to frame someone or i'm trying to steal something that's a malfeasance and i've intentionally consciously chosen to violate the rules and those require different kinds of strategies inside the department i remember i'm an old guy now and i remember when i first started in the police force you know and i worked midnight you know and you'd come to work and you'd work all night um there were i don't care who you are but sometimes at five o'clock in the morning it's kind of hard driving down the road to stay awake drink as much coffee as you want it gets hard well on those occasions where i pulled over before i ran into something um is that misconduct malfeasance what's happening versus some of my colleagues who came to work with an alarm clock and a pillow backed the car into a garage closed the garage door set the alarm clock climbed in the backseat they'd consciously made a decision to engage in misconduct so we we need to think about the framework i think the context which everyone here has said matters absolutely it matters in the type of misconduct it matters in the reform strategy the the issues that arise are very different and i don't care if you're talking about afghanistan samalia or the u.s the issues in new york are radically different than the issues in los angeles do we have some overlap absolutely in new york they had many many more issues cultural and context issues around thefts around malfeasance then in la where our issues were primarily around abuse of authority we had a much bigger issue around uh force excessive force the way we interacted with the public than the new york did you know the simplest way to think about the nypd you know you've you've seen nypd officers engage in arguments with the public right what are you doing no get off the side you know i would use some more colorful language um generally in those discussions in los angeles we practice the joe friday school right just the facts ma'am sit over here sit on the curb it's a much more it's a harder style but we don't engage and the misconduct that comes out of it is somewhat different um i think that a key aspect of this context is i would put it quite simply you get the police force you deserve the police force that you ultimately get is very much a function of the politics and the community and the country engagement so if the if the country or the community is deeply engaged and committed and wants a good police force you're much more likely to have a good police force if the country the community the city whatever you want it isn't and doesn't want it and stars it or does stars it for resources or doesn't pay attention or demands in proper conduct of it you know you get what you deserve if you go back to the roots of the la pd culture um the la pd culture was very much driven by three realities small police force well who made that decision how much money did we get how how many cops were we allowed to have small police force violent community we had a lot of crime issues we had a real contextual violence problem with gangs and drugs and other relishers and third huge geographic area so the culture that grew up in the la pd which was around officer safety arose from a factor of you knew when you showed up at a scene you were going to be by yourself for an extended period of time and that drove the tactics and the tactics drove the police interaction with the public and that drove the allegations of misconduct so again the context is critically important um i don't think enough has been said about sort of this idea of the government and and the police being part of the criminal justice system um i i really think that we need to you know we should have learned this from our interventions you got to have courts and you got to have prisons i can remember getting to Somalia and we're kind of you know that we started arresting people we said no what do we do with them and you know that's when the 40 foot shipping context became a prison um i can also tell you having been deployed to a bunch of these places as a a detail e to the department of justice when i said to the department of justice hey i need some prison guys because i don't i'm a cop i don't do prisons oh no no no prisons are bad we don't touch those you go down there and fix the police well i i think we're gonna arrest some people then um no no we'll get to that you know and so there's this ignorance of this system um i'm hopeful that the government is moving in a more comprehensive way to address this as a system but the failure to address it as a system leads to some of these misconduct issues and corruption issues uh and and a great example of that by the way of this failure to address these issues is extrajudicial killings i've been in a lot of places where extrajudicial killings are rather common um my experience is that almost always extrajudicial killings arise as a police response to a failure to effectively prosecute bad guys so without naming some of the countries i've worked in um one particular country they would the police would go out and arrest someone for murder it's a country that under their legal system doesn't allow plea bargaining the person would go to prison they'd be sitting there for a couple of years and over the course of the couple of years witnesses would be intimidated witnesses would be murdered and lo and behold the case would evaporate and the person would be released from jail when they get out they commit another murder and the cycle repeats itself well after the fourth or fifth time the police make a judgment hey this is a really bad guy and we're not getting them through the prosecution system so we'll just handle it ourselves and if you look the probably the largest example of it is if you look at india where they call them encounter killings and you know they got people that have done a hundred encounter killings you know the scale can be different but the concepts are the same the court systems in india are backlog i don't know david they were telling us 10 and 20 years cases are pending so what happens is the police jump in engage in misconduct serious misconduct because of a failure of the criminal justice system context really matters third point police misconduct is not static it changes as societies and as the context changes if you were to interview frank serpicoe in new york city in 1970 he would have felt as helpless about police corruption and police misconduct as any police officer in hydrobot india feels today yet that reality of new york city in 1970 is gone that idea of systemic police corruption the bag man going around picking up the payments payments being made that's really gone by and large from u.s policing and so the real learning point is where did that occur how are the triggers what are the things that we did that caused that kind of a change i would argue to the la pd in 2002 and the la pd of today are radically different organizations in terms of police misconduct why what are the mechanisms that drove that um i completely i'm in violent agreement with uh david and bob's comment about high and low level corruption and focusing on low level corruption the low level corruption is much more harmful to the rule of law um it absolutely undermines respect for government and by the way it is not intractable i repeatedly hear people say oh you know we can't get the cops away from taking traffic bribes or it is not intractable there are lots of different strategies again depending on the context peru fascinating if you go to peru uh most of the traffic officers for the police department are females they decided that females were less susceptible to corruption so they put females and all the traffic assignments now i don't think it's ever been systematically evaluated it's kind of an interesting concept chile the caribinero have a phenomenal i'm working in chile i've been spent a lot of time in chile probably five months this year in chile total the caribinero have almost no history of corruption very very low low levels of corruption why is that well they've put in place a series of controls and a series of mechanisms and a series of behaviors that inhibit some things that where they're at today they inhibit some human interaction but they have a profound impact on the caribinero culture so for example i'm out riding along in a lovely little community called la plantana it's three o'clock in the morning and i said to the guys i'm with can we stop and get a cup of coffee um and they said uh you know there's a gas station i'll buy let's stop and they said oh no no we're working we're not allowed to have any interaction with the business while we're working and it's it's one of those rules that was an outgrowth of how do we prevent corruption so we had to go back to a little base and drink nescafe um the efforts to reduce police corruption have got to be tailored i completely agree the who what why where and how are absolutely critical you have to look for the point of compromise i was in a former soviet satellite state earlier this year doing some training and the police colonel who was detailed to drive me around had a beautiful new range rover so we're driving around and i'm talking to the guy and uh i had figured out that his official salary was fourteen thousand dollars a year and i asked him about his range rover and he explained loved it he was very proud of it and cost him a hundred thousand dollars um where's the point of compromise that this colonel who's running a training institution is getting corrupt money i want to identify the point of compromise and i want to focus my police reform mechanisms on on on hindering that point of compromise that's where i want to attack it so we've got to tailor our efforts to the particular issues the change comes from the inside police departments absolutely have the ability to change can change and i think we've got to be clear we've got to have some clarity about external oversight um and actually sunday put up auditors um auditors inspector generals those kinds of things let's let's separate this investigate there's a line in david and bob's report that says investigate and monitor i want to say don't investigate monitor audit report i think when we get in wrapped around the axle around civilian review is when you get into them investigating and if you look at the history of it going back to eileen luna who was the first police oversight in the united states in berkeley california they got wrapped around the axle hugely and had much less impact because they were investigating individual cases rather than reporting on trends and issues i completely agree that marik bob's work at los angeles county sheriff's department has been groundbreaking and much more powerful and much more transformation um so i think there's growing evidence that auditing works best also tell you i think it's insane some of the independent processes we've gone to and i will name this one um i think one of the worst examples is our good friends in the united kingdom who've created something called the independent police complaints commission um i'm the chief of police of us of a force in england i don't have authority for the disciplinary of my police force so i'm not responsible for investigating or managing or controlling or discipling them it goes to this independent body well if we have a scandal don't come to me i'm going to send you to go see the icc ipcc i think i've been a chief of police in four different cities being responsible for discipline is not easy but it is a critical essential element of running an organization i don't know of another organization or another professional body that doesn't have the leaders responsible for the discipline of their own employees crazy that we do that um in terms of this idea of triage the triage idea is framed at least as i understood it talks about who gets the aid not what the aid is and i think we've really got to talk about what are we trying to do and what do we give aid for the reality is that most of the us aid has absolutely nothing to do with capacity building um our biggest police programs and i can go back however you want to go um have really revolved around military exit strategies panamon haydi samalia iraq afghanistan the police programs have all been about build something up get the military out of there and we've ignored much that we know about building police forces and capacity building i could tell stories for a couple of days i'll just tell one very quickly because i'm getting the time notice which i knew i knew i'd get squeezed um john bucanon worked with me and haydi back in 1993 john bucanon was part of a small team that was designing the framework of the Haitian police we were doing focus group meetings we were doing studies we were thinking about how to structure the police meanwhile i got general mead of the 10th mountain division and colonel mike dallas who happens to be a guy respected very much banging on me saying where's the table of organization and equipment for the Haitian police sign it up give me a napkin i can draw it for you well no no no we're trying to figure out what works best in the Haitian context i don't know we got to get these guys stood up i got to get back to for drum you know come on uh so you we really have a problem and i think the other thing that happened is what's happened with our foreign assistance to police forces has dramatically shifted it's gone from capacity building to operationally focus on us interests if you look at what the u.s government is spending on overseas police investment it's dea with vetted dea units it's the marshal service with how do we catch fugitives it's you know we're we're running operations overseas that benefit us that are not about building the capacity of the home state we have one agency ISATAP that has that capacity building mission which by the way doesn't even have a lying budget unless that's changed in the last year okay so i i think we do have a very real body of knowledge about what works i think we we absolutely have beyond the commissions one of the things that we did at LAPD was we we had something called the major city chiefs internal affairs group we got together the 10 police departments from around the country and developed some pretty good ideas about internal affairs i think i think of it more as i'm a doctor i come in i look at the situation i analyze the situation i investigate what the issues are and then i pull out my prescription pad and i choose from a variety of mechanisms that i then target to try and solve those particular problems i would make one cautionary remark at the end we all seem to have national amnesia we forget key lessons we have learned and so we keep doing the same mistakes over and over again there were some comments here about prior combatants there were comments here about structuring new police forces and some other things we have done all of these things in the past we know what works and what doesn't and yet we continually forget what we've done in the past i was talking to rachel neal about al salvador before this al salvador was a very specific formula 20 in the new police from the gorillas 20 from the government 60 never from the police force huge usa id uh demobilization program around formal police and former gorillas it's the only place i know that we've ever done that and it worked okay with some problems but it had real possibilities but we forget about it thank you that's the one thing about asking michael to speak it he's very reticent to tell you what he really thinks about things and we try to draw him out you know and i think maybe you know in overtime his real thoughts on things will will emerge uh the jumpy cannon sitting over here the poor fellow that michael said had to do all this this hard work uh anyway we now want to move into the second part of our program we have some some time left i want to invite the audience to ask questions or make comments the way we do this for those of you that may not have been here before as we ask people to come down there are microphones on each side of the hall and we ask you to queue up and and ask your questions we ask you to do this because we're capturing all this on videotape and and audio and the transcript of this will will go onto our website in a couple of weeks so while people are thinking of their questions and making their way down to the front to ask their questions i have a question i'm going to exercise my prerogatives here as the chair i want to ask each of the panel members to to talk about an instance where there was police corruption and it was cleaned up and then give us an idea of why this happened and i will model this uh by saying that usip has a program called justice and security dialogues which we started in napal and we now do in several countries where we began dialogues between the police and civil society um members of the police talking to members of civil society people that normally wouldn't speak to each other and once those dialogues got started we invited in local government without doing anything more than just getting people to talk to one another about their common concerns the performance of the police improved what seemed to be happening is the police were really reluctant to misbehave and then have to go back and face their their newfound friends their fellow citizens uh in these in these dialogues so with that as a model david you want to do the first one you know i think the most impressive case i know is queensland australia after 1989 and up to now um they had a terrible situation and they established a an independent commission to look at it called the fitzgerald commission uh it published he published his report in 1989 as a result of that what they did was to set up an independent body to supervise the police uh with investigating power michael and in fact the the premier of the state and the the chief commissioner of the queensland police ultimately went to jail uh both of them before that were sir this and sir that and so two sirs went to jail uh a highly profile and and the key to this however was to give because because frankly the the queensland police and the political establishment were incapable of they were so intermeshed in in in in misbehavior that it was that queensland really decided that they can't do it themselves and so an independent body by statute was established uh to investigate to clean house and then to monitor on a permanent basis the behavior of the queensland police and it has been a notable achievement that's all thanks my one will actually be on indonesia um where there's three hundred thousand police officers in the organization there and the issue they had was selection and recruitment processes which were less than optimal um involved um a percentage of money having to be paid to become a police officer if you were the political or the son of a general you were automatically granted entry into the process um they realized they had a problem they work with the international community and developed a system that was transparent and open um and for the last four years now their selection processes have been run um for the first two years with international scrutiny and now on their own and it appears to have made a significant difference thank you uh sanja um i think that the best example for me would be the michael doubt case and what happened in new york in the uh early 1990s with the molland commission and i would say well the arrest by the other police agency not the nypd the scandal that broke out then this this cycle where we're starting with um the political push for the for the mayor to do something the establishment of the independent commission the people who are appointed to be on the commission who or who are advisors for the commission who had great ideas on how to uh reform the department and the implementation of some of these recommendations not all of them but some of them and i can give you another example of um how difficult it is to deal with the corruption at the highest level of the police organization so for example in south africa um their interdiction period right now and is a 17 year of the post-apartee regime and the last two commissioners have both been charged with corruption the first one jackie sellaby was the president of the interpol at the time and he was last year convicted of corruption and sentenced to 15 years of um imprisonment and his successor beccy sellaby sorry beccy sellaby uh has been uh suspended in october of this year for again serious charges of corruption so we don't know what's going to happen but the problem is how do you get to these people and in both of these cases the media broke out the story so we have the important role of the independent media who actually investigated these cases so i don't know what's going to happen what the solution is going to be michael um i'd use a very simple one is complaints the taking of complaints this is an issue in every police department in america taking of citizen complaints which is an absolutely essential element david's got a great tagline about it you know the police have to be responsive to the disorganized public and part of that involves the taking of citizen complaints in la that was a perennial issue and by a variety of efforts including very clear policy very clear training backed up by undercover sting operations are people taking complaints completely changed the organizational culture to the fact that everybody was going to take a complaint when somebody made a complaint of police misconduct thanks very much i reopen and reiterate my invitation for people to come to the mics and ask questions and we'll start over here please uh our our custom here is for you to give us your name and affiliation and please hi thank you all for your presentations um my name is alexander i'm from the department of state and i wanted to ask about leadership i think we all can agree that it's important i think we all can agree that both here and in the developing world there are levels of leadership that that differ there are people who are very strong who get the goal of policing and people who are more interested in sort of personal benefit and i'm curious what you think that foreign assistance can do to sort of better empower these good leaders who get policing and sort of not necessarily marginalized but sort of sidestep those that are trying to co-opt it for their own goals okay michael you want to start well i think there's a this is a this is a tough one because leadership is critical to making successful changes but police organizations tend to be too leader centric and so i'm very hesitant particularly in the foreign environment to try and identify a leader and then train them i've been on too many of these missions where you know we pick our handpicked guy we fly him to the states we tour him around they go back and you know within six months they're either transferred to a different assignment than we envisioned or they're fired or doing something else so i i i think we have to be extremely careful it's um to me i think our foreign assistance needs to focus more on the structures uh and the organizational capacity initially rather than any one leader um and i think what we have to do is identify ways to develop crops of leaders rather than one the u.s policing world the western policing world remains incredibly leadership centric i could talk to you about what police departments are up today in the united states we'll all be based on who's the chief today if you talk to me about what's the greatest hospital in the united states you know you'll talk to me about boston mass you'll talk to me about some hospital in san diego nobody can name who's the head of it um we don't have the equivalent of teaching hospitals and police and i think what we really need to focus on organizational capacity before we get the leadership thanks for my talk take another question my name is martina vandenberg i'm an attorney here in washington dc in private practice and i'm the author of the human rights watch report uh hopes betrayed trafficking of women to bosnia and herzegovina for forced prostitution in the post-conflict period and my question is for mr soper the question concerns the role of impunity prince zade came out with a very important report several years ago discussing crimes committed by un personnel un civilians and peacekeepers his focus was largely on sexual exploitation and abuse but i think this goes much farther across the board to other issues of misconduct you mentioned in your remarks that it is still a problem that people are simply sent home and then there's no follow-up and i wondered if you could comment on that further and discuss what un dpa ko is doing to try and end impunity thanks very much thanks it's a police officer these are very real issues that we have to combat all the time i think from the 1990s when we started to be aware that these issues occurred we've we've put in place mechanisms like oversight committees our own oi os our independent investigation category but we still struggle with the people making a difference the evidence is sometimes difficult to establish in these peacekeeping missions the deployments are sometimes so short between six and twelve months that the issue may not even come to light in that time so that makes it difficult to be able to deal with as well but it comes back to the leadership problem that we just discussed sometimes the leadership not only in new end missions but also in the whole state isn't strong enough to be able to make the hard decisions as to how to do it but you need evidence first sometimes we haven't got that we are building up the curriculum and the doctrinal framework trying to increase the value base of the organization to lessen the possibility that these things can happen but i'd have to say we make in progress but we've still got a long way to go the sexual and gender based violence in particular the the curriculum and the training standards and the guidelines that were built up around that are just beginning to be implemented effectively now so i suspect in the future we're going to make progress as a practitioner i don't think we're anywhere near where we need to be at this stage thanks very much we'll take another question peter peter gantz office of transnational issues thank you very much for a great discussion i wanted to and a lot of the examples that were discussed are from this country so one of the things that occurred to me is a question is we lack a national police force is there a dynamic that comes into play with that in terms of trying to figure out how to address police corruption and poor i think michael's right police misconduct and is there an impediment for us because we lack an understanding of that dynamic on a basis i'd like to ask david and michael and sanja to talk about it because they come at it from different perspectives david well yes yes and no um it depends on who it depends on how we draw on the expertise in policing in the united states and projected abroad um i mean i don't see any reason in principle why a national police force uh could not give very practical advice about how you clean up corrupt police unit or department i don't know probably i think the french may know a lot about that they're centralized the problem tends to be in the united states that the federal the federal police who are of course employed by the agencies that that the federal agencies and we often rely on them wholly abroad are not full what we call first full service police agencies and so they're not apt to know less about that that boundary of interaction between the public and the police and the people who know most about that are at state and local levels and we have to have and i think we all recognize this we have to have a way of drawing on the considerable expertise that that michael has has has exemplified today we need to draw upon that and project that abroad in order to i think be a more effective if we're talking about changing behavior of how police interact with with the public and i think that's the key to what we're talking about whether we're talking about misbehavior in general or whether we're talking about technical corruption and i say the people who know most about rooting that out i think are at state and local levels they've had most of the experience which isn't to say let me be very careful about this which isn't to say that people in the marginal service and dea and the fbi have not had some experience of that both at home huh and and abroad but i would say that we need to to to draw more more widely upon the expertise that's available in the united states and would we can overcome this in the united states and i certainly wouldn't ever discriminate against a country that has a national police force by saying that they don't have the expertise that's required explain or sajan i think that one of the problems of these legal experts or that expertise that is provided to different countries is that we need to be very careful as to how the system looks like because what we're proposing may not fit the system and when you look at what was happening in germany and then the world war two each of the countries sorry the allies brought their own style of policing and in the end germans didn't like either of them germans preferred their own style of policing so we need to be very careful what we are bringing and how we are doing that so that would be one of my concerns and secondly that um we also bring send the people who know what they're doing and who are people of high integrity and in the post-conflict periods like what was happening in bosnia there are some accusations of the un troops actually being involved in the human rights violations in corruption and so on themselves so these are not the people who should be training the police officers so that's one of the concerns and i don't think to what degree we actually have some process established that we are trying to determine who should go personal into such endeavors Michael i think it's a mix of a couple of things first of all i think we don't have a national police force which operates for our detriment in the international environment the people that tend to get overseas are from federal specialized agencies and they are as david said they are fundamentally different than than what is policing in most places most the countries that i go to what it most resembles is you know the michigan state police or the new york state police somebody who's doing a little bit of urban policing a little bit of traffic policing a little bit of rural policing uh they're responding to calls and they're investigating crimes but the people that we tend to deploy are from specialty agencies that don't run dispatch centers that don't respond to the disorganized public so we have a problem i think the debate that's going on worldwide is more about it's less about national police forces although depending on the country that can certainly be the issue the netherlands is now combining their 23 police forces into one but i think it's more about um uh it's more about how big does a police department need to be to effectively manage incidents and i think there's being a lot of discussion around that and it's a discussion that we've not had in the united states so i think it inhibits us from growth we we turn to the specialized agencies that don't do policing to guide and lead and you know sort of manage a lot of core policing functions we don't have the equivalent that the uk has of the national police improvement agency and the last point i would make is the people that we tend to export and that tend to do a lot of the policing stuff i mean i could talk about the the civ poll contracts again for quite a while with pretty negative i'd be hard-pressed not to give my opinion which bob bob you know actually created the died quark concept but but um but but um we we tend to rely on the military and the military is not the police i'm very respectful of people in the military i seem to remember years ago in chronicle learning that the goal of military to close with the enemy and destroy with overwhelming force um that's radically different than what i learned after that in the police academy and i think we we confuse those two issues and the people that we have doing these missions overseas they're different skill sets what michael was referring to is that um i was the person at the department of state that organized the first u.s police contingent that ever went to a post-conflict intervention this was in Haiti and we realized that at that point that we didn't have a national police force no other country in the world would send police unless there was an american contingent we looked around and we needed policemen almost automatically and so we hired the dying core corporation and we and they found 50 guys who maybe had been police sometime in their lives many were mall guards about half of them had to be sent home in the first week because they had problems of in their past but um you know that was the way it started so michael's never let me forget that but because we have one more question we'll take that and then we'll give the panel an opportunity to make final remarks and and then we'll close because please thank you for your patience thanks my name is dan cleberg i'm from the marine corps center for regular warfare and my question is for the panel have any of you had the opportunity to read the army marine corps counterinsurgency manual and if so do you think it adequately addresses the the importance of building law enforcement capacity i give that to david because he actually has any weed together written a book about it so bomb and i wrote actually we planted that question and the answer is we have read it and no it doesn't um i mean it philosophically it's right it talks about the importance of doing this in in in the portrayous vision of counterinsurgency but it doesn't say a word about how to do it and who's to manage it and that's the problem and so that there was a follow-on that needed to be needed to be done which is to say how do we how do you know you just simplify it if you say that the the key to the the strategy there is a clear hold and build um right um what what was never talked about was how you transition from stage one which is clearing to the holding which is a combined operation between uh indigenous police and military and foreign police and military and then last which is build which is primarily done by the local police and the local military and and and and is based on the necessity of creating good governance and that simply isn't that isn't hasn't been filled in tactically and it needs to be and that's what our brilliant book does the book for those of you that may not know is called police in war and it's available on amazon.com among other places um this is shameless i know but what can i say uh having brought michael into this process he'll probably arrest me at the end of the meeting for violating some regulation i'm not aware of and bob you ought to say in the title of that book is the police in war i mean bob bob push the book push the book out where's sanchez you hear anything sanchez sanchez no okay anyway um what i want to do is give the panel one last chance to make a comment uh and then then we'll close to the morning um let's start with michael um i think that it's for those of us who've been involved in police assistance foreign police assistance for some period of time it's been a mission of great frustration um it should be tremendously rewarding and it can be in limited circumstances but i think overall my experience has been one of opportunity lost rather than opportunity grabbed uh and i i just i i think we have the collective knowledge and wisdom after doing this for a long period of time now if you if you want to pick the post uh usa id effort which you know was in the 70s 60s and 70s and then ended we had a gap from what 74 through 86 so if you go to 86 if you use 86 as a starting point of modern us police assistance i think we we know what we need to do we just have never gotten our act together and so uh the the challenge i think would be to really get organized in the particularly in the u.s federal government and in our agencies that provide you know the state department and others department of justice and really organize around what we know works and organize our strategies around that and let's have some clarity about it we're spending a lot of money it's incredibly disorganized and disconnected and not clear about what our objectives are so i i think there is a lot that we can do on the international stage i think we have largely failed to be as effective as we could be and i personally believe that if we focus on effective capacity building we would have an incredibly positive effect on the operational us issues thanks a lot sunshine i think that i would emphasize the need to learn what really goes on in the country or in the police agency that you are focusing on i think this contextual element is really important because it's going to vary dramatically from one to place to another and what we find that might be work united states in some agencies may not make completely fail in some of the other agencies and when we do our police integrity research we do have a questionnaire that we use to survey police officers simply to see where we are and then based on the recommendations we can move forward and say these are the issues you want to address we want to deal with the code of sounds the code of sounds in particular the issues that relate for example with taking money from the motors who have been stopped speeding so it's important to know what you want to do and then do the list the your priority list the function that you want to follow but that should be based highly on what you know about the country what you know about the needs and the problems there thanks very much anthill i just really wanted to finish with police are unique and we try to talk now about police service rather than police force just to bring that change process about more effectively and following on from mike's comments we have the ability and we've got the skills to operate in this new environment that we find ourselves in with sound reform and restructuring techniques we do have them and we're getting better at them but we're constrained by military and political short-term imperatives might be the best way to describe it which prevent us from being as effective as we can if we're allowed to put in good policing models that we know and understand what we know we can be more effective but currently as we've heard the union in particular the business class ticket out of conflict environments for overseas military the sooner they can get out the better and and so we're left with some legacies that take more than a decade or so to resolve so our focus is on being really good mom role models in the union in terms of police misconduct and focusing on that quality capacity building and institutional building of those host states that we deal with thanks for that david you have the final word in the business of of police assistance and innovation anywhere i think the mindset is capacity building in other words you focus on institutions and hope us and hope that righteous behavior will follow and what bomb and ire are suggesting in this monograph is to reverse that that we want rather than than creating certain institutions and hoping that good things will occur we invest millions in all of these these think these institutions and often good things don't happen and the fact is that some very well run police institutions with lots of capacities can do frightful things and so what we're now suggesting is why don't we turn this around and that rather than reforming institutions kind of on block first and then hoping for good behavior let's focus on producing some some some specifiable visible behaviors work on getting those behaviors and you know kind of one by one by one and and by succeeding with one behavior and i cited you several from india and from from nigeria but by succeeding in in solving those particular problems you will eventually begin to reform the institutions that are required to do that so what we're suggesting is is is don't it is go from behavior to institutions in other words from demonstrated success to the to the reformation of the institutions which are are are implicated and responsible in that success that's what we're suggesting invert the kind of mentality that we normally employ in this business let me say one last thing that i didn't say in in in the presentation this does require that the regime the political establishment provides space for even that to happen and we've got to keep stressing that if if if the regime will not provide permission it's hopeless now i think there's another advantage then that comes from me from the from the disaggregate approach that bob and i are advocating and that is if you say to regime look we're we're we're not going to attack your whole system of interaction between corrupt cops and corrupt politicians what we're going to do is to is to work on a couple of problems which is causing alienation between the regime as represented by the police and the public in other words if you can get them to buy off on some of what i consider high priority matters like paying money when people need a fir in india i think they might accept that and find it at least difficult to take but not to provide permission for doing that on the other hand if you're going to say we we are going to create we're going to work on institutions of leadership and oversight and pay and all of that all at once and and in order to get a a a righteous police force they're not going to give you permission for doing that so i am suggesting that maybe an end run around the problem of political permission is to work small thanks very much i want to remind everybody what we've been talking about today is a new report on police corruption it's available outside the door on table so please grab a copy on your way out i want to thank the panel for a really terrific presentation this morning i'd like to ask for a round of applause i'd like to thank all of you for coming this morning through the rain and i have one piece of good news for you it's warmer outside the door of this building that is in this room and with that thank you very much and and goodbye