- Category: Uncategorized
Oddly enough, the number of police officers per capita in Russia is also several times higher than world standards
Sergei Okunev, with numbers in hand, refutes the myth that more police means more security
The other day, Russian Police Day was widely celebrated in narrow circles. This is perhaps one of the most high-profile “profile” holidays, along with Airborne Forces Day. First of all, because lately there are so many police officers in Russia that Police Day is celebrated almost more people than the conventional Easter. And so, taking this solemn occasion, I would like to once again talk about the Russian police and its effectiveness.
Of course, the temptation is strong to once again talk about the dispersal of rallies, about beatings and murders in police departments and about other lawlessness that is happening in our country. But, firstly, all this has become so much lately that it won’t surprise anyone, and secondly, it’s still a holiday, I’d like to somehow touch on the topic of the Russian police in more depth.
And here, very usefully, we can recall one classic myth: yes, there are a lot of police in Russia, yes, they have broad powers and sometimes they exceed them, but here we are safe! Not like in this damned Europe. And in the USA? It’s scary to go out there after 9 pm!
This typical myth can be briefly called - “More police - more security.” And today is a great moment to figure out what’s wrong with this thesis.
First, it’s worth understanding the first part of this phrase. Are there many police in Russia? Yes. So many. Our country in last years consistently included in the list of countries with the largest number police officers per 100,000 population. And this despite the fact that in addition to the actual police, we also have the Russian National Guard, all sorts of special departments under the Ministry of Internal Affairs, riot police, and so on. Many ratings do not take this into account, so it is not very clear how many police officers and various other law enforcement officers there are in Russia. However, even if we count official data, Russia has 610 police officers per 100,000 population. And if this figure does not impress you, then compare it with Germany - 299 employees and France - 356. At the same time, it should be noted that these countries in Europe are perhaps the most problematic in terms of public safety, especially against the backdrop of the migration crisis and other internal problems . That is, these figures are crisis figures and they are two times less than in “stable” Russia.
Are there countries where there are more police? Of course, there are, but I’m afraid that not every one of you will even read their names without hesitation the first time. For example - Antigua and Barbuda - 734 police officers per hundred thousand population, Bahamas - 848 employees, Bermuda - 730, Brunei - 1076, Grenada - 818, Dominica - 710, Macau - 738, Monaco - 1375, Nauru - 800, Niue - 800 and a number of dwarf states. Of course, it is statistically incorrect to compare Russia with dwarf states, since this “skew” is caused by the small population of these countries. More or less adequate examples include Serbia - 632 employees per hundred thousand, Singapore - 753, Montenegro - 840, South Sudan - 630. In general, that’s all. All other civilized countries in the world have fewer police officers than in Russia.
To understand the issue, it is important to keep in mind that, according to UN recommendations, the optimal indicator for maintaining public order and security is considered to be 220 police officers per 100 thousand inhabitants, that is, in Russia almost 3 times more. In addition, the same UN in Russia estimates that there are 976 police officers per 100 thousand population, but this rating includes various departments, including drug control departments, the notorious “Center E” and so on.
So that you can finally understand whether there are many or few police officers in Russia, let’s compare them with neighboring and familiar countries. For example, in Estonia - 237 employees per 100,000 population, Latvia - 195, Lithuania - 325, Poland - 262, Romania - 281 and even Ukraine - 397. In addition, the older population of post-Soviet countries still has a propaganda stereotype about a huge army of police in The USA, however, is just a myth - 256 employees per 100 thousand, more than 2 times less than in Russia.
So, we've dealt with the first part. There are many, many, simply indecently many police in Russia. Based on the thesis “More police officers - more security,” our country should be the safest in the world, or at least one of the top three such countries. To find out, you can turn to perhaps the most authoritative source on the topic - the reports of the “UN Office on Drugs and Crime.” This agency regularly publishes official statistics for many dozens of countries around the world, including Russia. And since it would be strange to take whole numbers due to the difference in the populations of the countries, we will use the same coefficients per 100,000 population. Perhaps a more impartial and objective statistical method cannot be found.
So, Russia, with its entire army of law enforcement agencies, ranks 16th in the list of countries in terms of the number of murders per 100,000 population. And if you think that 16 is not even a top ten and certainly not first place, then it’s worth looking at those in front of us. List on your screens.
Here, perhaps, it can be noted that the rest of Russia’s “competitors” are third world countries. However, for example, in the Congo, Nigeria, Gambia, Guinea-Bessau and Ethiopia there are fewer murders than in Russia.
Of the more or less adequate countries - Lithuania is in 46th place with a coefficient exactly two times lower than ours, the USA is in 51st place, Estonia is in 61st place, Belgium, for example, is in 70th place, Finland is in 74th place, France is in 75th place, Germany is in 93rd place with an indicator of more than than 10 times lower than ours, Poland is on line 97. We can continue ad infinitum, but the essence is probably already clear.
In the general list of countries, Russia ranks 172nd, provided that the safest countries are ranked first, and those with the most murders are ranked last. And in other indicators, it is difficult for Russia to compete even with the Baltic countries. For example, we are robbed almost twice as often as in Estonia - 50.7 robberies per 100,000 population versus 25.6 cases among the Baltic states. 709 thefts per 100,000 population versus 357 cases in Poland. Although, it is worth admitting, cars are stolen from us just as often as from the Poles.
There are a huge number of all kinds of reports from both the UN and independent agencies; each of you can open Google right now and compare Russia’s indicators with other countries. And what conclusion can be drawn from these indicators? And the conclusion is very simple - the safest countries, which have the least number of thefts, murders and rapes, have just a small number of police officers per capita. And countries with an indicator of more than 500 employees per hundred thousand are third world countries, and more often than not, those in deep crisis. And it’s a pity that Russia is in the first positions on this list.
Sergey Okunev
No similar materials
Both Western and Russian liberal media have been feeding their audiences with the fact that Russia is supposedly the “most police” country in the world for many years now. Full ratings, while almost no one ever published, getting away with infographics with photographs of overweight Russian traffic cops and pumped-up American cops.
And now, finally, a relatively comprehensive rating has appeared. Hundreds of Russian, Ukrainian (where would we be without them?) and Western media, citing The Independent, which in turn refers to Bloomberg, announced that the full rating, developed on some secret UN research, has finally appeared. True, the author never found an expanded sign in any “Cyrillic” media. The news authors either limited themselves to listing 5-10 ranking positions, or again posted infographics, although this time more “strict” - without complete traffic cops.
The author of these lines decided not to be lazy and find the “original source” in Bloomberg. And the original source was found. The figures circulated in the newspapers were even quite consistent with him. And then two questions arose. The first is regarding the selectivity of the media, which presented only part of the rating positions. The second is regarding the correctness of the rating itself. Apparently, the first question is directly related to the second. Bring newspaper editors full versions rating - it would raise very strong doubts among many.
So, here are some examples. In the Bloomberg ranking, as in many others, Russia takes the sad first place among the “most police” states with 564 police officers per 100 thousand population; second - Turkey with 474, third - Italy with 467, fourth - Portugal with 454, fifth Hong Kong - with 450. Next, with approximately the same order of numbers, follow Kazakhstan, Algeria, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Czech Republic. Israel is in 14th place with 372. France is in 23rd place with 299. The USA is in 32nd place with 226.
It is no coincidence that I called the rating relatively comprehensive. The fact is that it contains only 53 positions. In 53rd place is Guinea with 52 police officers per 100 thousand inhabitants. Apparently, it is understood that those who are lower on the list have even less “saturation” of society with police. And there are even more questions.
A year ago, bloggers unearthed another tablet, also fragmentary - but much more plausible. So, according to it, the first place in the ranking of police states is occupied by... the Vatican with a conditional 15,625 police officers per 100 thousand inhabitants. And yet everything is true! The official population of Vatican City is 842 people. And the Vatican police (Pontifical Gendarmerie) has 130 employees. Moreover, this is the classic police, engaged in criminal investigation, traffic control, etc. The Swiss Guard is not included in the number of Vatican police officers - since it does not serve the Vatican, but the “Papal Throne” directly. So Bloomberg has already been caught in a lie, at least on this point.
In second place, according to the same blogger sign, is Monaco with 1,374 police officers per 100 thousand inhabitants. And again it seems to be true! The population of the principality is about 35 thousand people. But the gendarmerie paramilitary units of the Department of Internal Affairs alone consist of 242 people. Plus - civilian employees of the Department...
In third place, according to the same tablet, is Brunei with 1076 police officers per 100 thousand population. There is not much open information on the current state of Brunei's security forces, but the data is still very plausible. The population of the sultanate is about 400 thousand people. Only one Gurkha reserve unit of the Royal Brunei Police, playing the role of the “national guard” of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, numbers more than 2 thousand people.
Further on the same table are Montenegro, Uruguay, Singapore, etc. Everything is quite reasonable. For some reason, most of these countries are simply missing from Bloomberg’s list, which already casts doubt on it. I propose not to analyze each position separately - as this can turn the article into an entire monograph. Instead, I propose to look into the correctness of the data for Russia and compare them with Bloomberg’s “host country” - the United States.
Bloomberg allegedly refers to some “UN data,” but everything turned out to be more prosaic. The figure of 564 per 100 thousand population can be easily calculated in the article “Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation” on Wikipedia. According to it, the total number of our Ministry of Internal Affairs is 821 thousand people. Comparing this figure with the population of Russia, we get what we are looking for - 564 employees per 100 thousand people. Such is the super-analytics of the UN from Wikipedia... I will please Bloomberg. This figure can be increased a little more if desired. After all, law enforcement functions in our country are still performed by the FSB, FSIN, and FSKN. Considering that these departments are much smaller in number than the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the number of law enforcement officers per 100 thousand population in our country can reach somewhere around 600. But this - including everyone - civilian and military, certified and not certified, detectives, investigators, analysts, patrol officers, security guards, accountants and psychologists... As we see, we are still far from the conventional indicators of the Vatican or Brunei. So Russia is clearly no longer “the best police force.”
Now let's deal with another big lie of the rating. The United States, as mentioned above, is in 32nd place in the Bloomberg ranking with 226 law enforcement officers per 100 thousand population. Let's make sure that this is an even more blatant lie than Russia's 1st place. Given a population of 316 million, a simple proportion shows that, according to Bloomberg, there should be about 716,000 law enforcement officers in the entire United States. Now let's start counting.
In the US National Guard alone, a conditional analogue of our Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, about 467 thousand people serve at once! Thus, according to Bloomberg, all other US law enforcement agencies should serve only about 250 thousand people. Is it possible? No! According to information about the New York City Police Department, more than 35 thousand employees serve in it (only in the municipal police). In Moscow, which formally has exactly one and a half times the population of New York, there are about 80 thousand police officers. There seems to be more in Moscow, but the difference is not at all impressive. And even in such calculations lies deception. The fact is that our Ministry of Internal Affairs is a centralized structure, which includes the lion’s share of Russian law enforcement officers. For comparison, the number of the FSB together with the border service is estimated by experts in open sources to be approximately 200 thousand people. Compared to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the composition of other law enforcement agencies in Russia is absolutely tiny.
But in the United States, the “municipal police,” with which we compared the Moscow headquarters, is just one of the many links in the law enforcement system.
At the federal level in the United States, there is the FBI, which, in addition to intelligence services, also performs police functions - it fights banditry, catches murderers, and even investigates attacks on postmen.
At the level of each state there is a state police, which has its own functions and jurisdiction.
The next one is the city police (the same New York police that we compared with the Moscow headquarters).
In addition, such serious and numerous federal structures as the Marshals Service have law enforcement functions.
Moreover, all the signs of law enforcement agencies (and sometimes even much more rights) have such bodies as the Natural Resources Control Police, the Drug Control Agency, and the Agency for the Control of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
States create, at their own request, additional bodies that in some way duplicate the functions of the FBI and the police. For some reason they are very popular in Hollywood. These include, for example, the famous Texas Rangers or the California Bureau of Investigation.
And this is to say nothing of the fact that departments such as the Department of Finance and the Department of Energy have their own large law enforcement units.
Now let's add to all this the US Department of Homeland Security, to which the Coast Guard, the Federal Protective Service, the US Customs and Border Protection Service, the Secret Service and a number of other departments are subordinate, the total number of employees of which is hundreds of thousands of people (in the Coast Guard - up to 100 thousand, Pogranichnaya - more than 60 thousand, etc.).
Thus, the number of US law enforcement officers per 100 thousand population simply physically cannot be less than in Russia. It is most likely even somewhat larger (it is enough that the US National Guard is three times larger in number than the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs).
Bloomberg's "experts" acted simply. They took from the Internet the total number of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, which makes up about 80% of all law enforcement agencies in the country, and includes internal troops, and compared it with the estimated number of only the “local” police in the United States. I think there is no need to comment on the correctness of this comparison in view of everything stated above.
Who is the “police state” after this? But it is also desirable to analyze the regulatory framework. In Russia, the “American” system of wiretapping or accessing a person’s email without court approval is simply savagery. Just like shooting to kill an unarmed person. Do you think that a court in Russia would acquit a policeman who shot an unarmed minor teenager 6 times in the head, simply because he seemed suspicious?
Citadel and its guards
History of the security forces
Russia is a country of security forces. Based on the number of police officers alone per 100 thousand people Russian Federation ranks first in the world. There are 5.5 police officers for every thousand Russians. Even in China (2012 data) this figure is only 3.2, and for example, in Germany - 2.9. In constantly warring Israel it is also 2.9. At the same time, the police are not the only representatives of the security class, which in the 2000s became the main beneficiary of the regime, at the same time its support and beneficiary.
Throughout these 12 years that we are talking about, the number of armed men in uniform and expenses have been constantly growing. federal budget for their content. During these years, the general power class was divided into various interest groups, into various clans. By the end of the 2000s, competition or direct struggle between these clans turned into some kind of parody of political competition, some kind of its replacement, a rather bad replacement, I must admit (“Sand is a bad replacement for oats”). But nevertheless, this is a surrogate for a system of checks and balances. Instead of public control, instead of mutual restraint of the branches of power in the Russian political situation, we have competition between the security forces.
Who makes up this armed bureaucracy, how many of these people are there? So, who are the security forces, who makes up this class?
Ministry of Internal Affairs
The most numerous power structure in Russia is the Ministry of Internal Affairs. As of 2005, its staff consisted of more than 820 thousand people; In 2015, the number of employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs exceeded one million. The Ministry of Internal Affairs underwent one of the most sweeping reforms of the 2000s. This is the so-called police reform, which actually transferred it from the police to the police. The first steps in this direction were taken back in 2009 as a reaction to a number of high-profile crimes committed by police officers.
Many remember the case of Major Evsyukov, the man who opened fire in a supermarket in the south of Moscow. It was planned to simultaneously reduce the number of members of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and increase allocations for the payment of remuneration to employees. In 2010, the upcoming police reform was announced, and in August 2010 a draft law “On the Police” was published in the public domain, which was intended to replace the current law “On the Police”.
He set himself whole line goals: first of all, increasing the efficiency of the police, increasing citizens' trust in them, reducing the number and increasing salaries of employees. Indeed, during the reform that began in 2011, the number of internal affairs officers was reduced by 22%. However, as we see, by 2015 the staff of the Ministry of Internal Affairs had grown again and became larger than in any previous years. Indeed, police officers began to receive more money, and in addition, a number of measures were introduced to increase the openness of the Ministry of Internal Affairs system. The most famous of them is the introduction of badges that police officers are required to wear.
At the same time, starting in 2001, there was a process of reassigning regional security forces and specific regional departments of internal affairs from governors to the president. The essence of the process was to build a single vertical for the protection of order in the broad sense of the word, if we are talking about the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and to subordinate it specifically to the federal center. The exceptions in this regard, which continue to have their own power resources, are the national republics. First of all the republics North Caucasus, especially Chechnya.
For now, let’s record the situation we arrived at in 2012: the police have been reformed, their numbers have been somewhat reduced, and, let’s say, they have become to some extent more open. Based on sociological data, we cannot say that the level of trust in the police has somehow increased, but the power vertical has been completely reassigned to the president.
FSB, FSO and others
The Ministry of Internal Affairs is, naturally, not the only power structure, but it is the most numerous. As of 2005, the prosecutor's office employs about 190 thousand people, and the General Prosecutor's Office - 53 thousand. There are about 30 thousand people in the Federal Migration Service. An extremely numerous, rich and fairly independent law enforcement agency is the Ministry of Emergency Situations, which has been operating since 1991, since its creation, under the leadership of one minister. In 2005, 350 thousand people worked there, in 2015 - already more than 370 thousand. About 340 thousand are in the Ministry of Justice. And the Federal Drug Control Service, created in 2003 (and, looking ahead, liquidated in 2016), has 33 thousand people in 2005. As of 2015, so to speak, towards its end, there are already 40 thousand.
How many people work in the intelligence services themselves - the FSO, the FSB and military intelligence - due to the secrecy regime, we cannot say for sure. According to various sources, the FSB in the 2000s was about 120 thousand people. If we add the border service employees, which became part of the FSB, then it will be more than 200 thousand people. According to various estimates, since the beginning of the 2000s, the staffing level of the FSB, excluding the border service, has increased by 1.5–2 times. We see about 20 thousand people in the foreign intelligence service, but again, we don’t know exactly. The FSO employs from 10 to 25 thousand people.
The number of staff members of law enforcement agencies, despite local reductions or, more precisely, talk of such reductions, has generally been growing over the past 15 years. In the same way, federal budget spending on the sections “National Security” and “Law Enforcement”, which are responsible for feeding the security forces class, also grew. Over the years of observation, this figure as a percentage of GDP has never fallen below 1.3%. As a percentage of total federal budget expenditures, it has always been more than 8, and (with some decrease in the crisis year of 2008) after 2009 there has been a constant increase. We are approaching 2012 with a budget in which about 11% of the money is allocated to expenses related to national security and law enforcement.
Is it a lot or a little? By comparison, in the United States, consolidated budget spending on security is about 1.5% of GDP. In federal budget expenditures this is 0.19%. As we can see, this is a figure that we have not come close to in all these years. So, over the course of these 12 years, the Russian security forces have consumed an increasingly larger share of budget expenditures.
At the same time, the so-called closed part grows budget expenditures. What it is? The federal budget, like any other law, is considered by the State Duma. It is considered in plenary sessions and accordingly published. Some of the expenses that are considered secret are considered behind closed doors and are not discussed at plenary sessions. They are considered by a special commission of the State Duma. It includes the chairman of the budget committee, the chairman of the security committee and a number of other deputies. Mainly former employees intelligence services and the Ministry of Defense, who were usually deputy ministers there - people of this level.
What percentage of these are closed expenses, that is, those that are not subject to public review? From 2005 to 2012 - from 10 to 11%. These are not necessarily expenses specifically for the special services. For example, expenses for capital construction for some reason they also began to be classified as secret; some of the expenses for housing and communal services are also closed. If in 2012 this was 11.7% of the budget, in 2014 it was already 14.2%, in 2015 - 16.7%, by the end of 2015 - a fantastic figure of 20.2%. So, more than 20% of the federal budget by 2015 is distributed behind closed doors.
The higher the influence of the intelligence services and security forces in general on the internal and foreign policy, the more money they take for themselves, the correspondingly greater the influence of their specific mentality, which involves consideration outside world as a set of threats and challenges.
Army
For specific reasons in Russian political history, our intelligence services and security forces are political actors. The army was not one until very recently. The roots of this specific phenomenon go back to the period after the Great Patriotic War, in particular, at the stage when there was a struggle with Marshal Zhukov and his entourage precisely in order to prevent the emergence of the army as a separate political subject, as an actor in the political process. This state of affairs has begun to change somewhat in recent years, but this is beyond the scope of our course. How is that balance maintained between competing security forces, the maintenance of which is one of the main tasks and goals of the supreme power?
Competition between security forces
The security forces have both power resources and control over entire regions and spheres of economic activity. This is not only a vulgarly understood protection scheme in the spirit of the 90s, it is already a much deeper penetration of power actors into the economic fabric, which allowed, for example, Olga Romanova, a person knowledgeable in this area, to say that real Russian entrepreneurs are siloviki or siloviki are the real Russian entrepreneurs. We cannot say exactly what volume of economic turnover is directly or indirectly controlled by representatives of security forces or their beneficiaries, but we can simply record the fact that the penetration is quite deep.
One of the main hidden but defining plots domestic policy In the 2000s, there was competition between the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB for control over the flows passing through customs. What was the task of the supreme power in this situation? To ensure that no one specific winner emerges who could control this clearing entirely, so that some mega-powerman does not emerge who could defeat everyone else, or even so that two opposing towers do not arise that are left alone with each other, suppressing all other centers of resistance. For this reason, security forces in Russia are a constant subject of reform.
New structures emerge from them, these new structures are then disbanded, and the leadership changes. All this activity, if we look at it from a distance of ten years, has as its goal the maintenance of this complex dynamic balance. In 2011, what was the Investigative Committee under the Prosecutor’s Office was separated from the General Prosecutor’s Office into a separate structure, the Investigative Committee, which becomes a competitor to the Prosecutor’s Office and has been fighting against it all these years. All these new structures begin to fight for authority, for resources, for control. Accordingly, this struggle does not allow any of them to intensify in any way.
So, let's record the situation that we saw. This is not about the fact that some specific security officers seized power in Russia. It's about, I repeat, about a broad, vast, rich and influential class, speaking in Marxist language, this very power bureaucracy. We have an economic bureaucracy, there is a media bureaucracy, there is a financial bureaucracy - all these are people who, to one degree or another, work for the state. But it is precisely this armed power bureaucracy that becomes the core of the bureaucratic class.
The effectiveness of the main activities of law enforcement agencies - combating crime that actually exists in society, regulating migration, blocking channels for drugs entering the country, and even in some cases fighting terrorism - turns out to be extremely low
Despite the timely arrival of the Confederations Cup matches, which became the formal reason for yet another large-scale ban on mass demonstrations, Russia Day will be remembered as a holiday during which the essence of Russia as a police state is more visible than ever before. Yes, we have enough security forces, but aren’t there too many of them? And aren’t the costs of these structures too high, especially considering the quality of their work? These questions are heard often - so let's look at the numbers.
In Russia today, 914,500 people are on the staff of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. This is the third largest police force in the world (of course, after China - 1.6 million people) and India (1.5 million). At the same time, in terms of the number of police officers per 100,000 inhabitants, China (120 people) and India (128 people) lag behind Russia (623 people) by approximately five times. It is worth noting that all developed countries lag behind us in this indicator: in the USA the corresponding figure is 256 people, in the EU countries - from 300 to 360. Ahead, not counting exotic islands and dwarf states, only our closest friends are Belarus and Serbia (and it is unclear how South Sudan got into this company). During the times of the “authoritarian” USSR, 623,000 people served in the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs and the “policing” rate was almost three times lower.
No less important is the question of how much it costs to divert such a number of citizens from economically useful activities that could be used for other purposes. In 2016, 1.08 trillion rubles, or 1.26% of GDP, were allocated for the needs of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In the United States, $134 billion, or 0.72% of GDP, is spent on police forces, paid almost entirely from local budgets. Germany has approximately the same figure (0.7% of GDP), a little more high level(almost 0.9%) it is in France. Moreover, while the fight against demonstrators in Russia can be considered quite successful, the fight against crime is unlikely. In 2015, the country committed minimal amount murders over the years - 11,700, but this gives an average figure of 80.3 cases per 1 million inhabitants - against 49 in the USA, 10.5 in France and 8.4 in Germany. In other words, taking into account the number of violent crimes and the cost of police forces, the effectiveness of public order protection in Germany exceeds Russian indicators by 20 times! But, of course, neither the German nor the French ministers of the interior have the kind of official plane with a bedroom and apartments that the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs ordered for the “first person” for only 1.7 billion rubles. Let your foreign colleagues be jealous.
However, of course, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, although the largest, is not the only security service in the country. Apart from it there is the National Guard, numbering up to 400,000 people, the Ministry of Emergency Situations with 289,000 employees, the Federal Penitentiary Service, which employs 295,000 people, the Federal Security Service with a classified staff, estimates of the number of which are usually 100,000-120 000 people, and with the border service - up to 200,000, Customs Service (about 70,000), Prosecutor's Office and Investigative Committee (more than 60,000), Drug Control (almost 34,000), Migration Service (up to 35,000) and a number of others less numerous in number employees of agencies such as FSO, FAPSI and the like). I am omitting the question about the army, as well as about completely civilian services, often (and not without reason) classified as law enforcement, such as the Tax Police, the judiciary, etc. However, even in this “incomplete” form, the number of law enforcement officers in Russia does not fall below 2.6 million people.
From the point of view of the total number of employees, this figure looks exceptionally large. In the same United States, where all police forces, the National Guard, the personnel of the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation do not exceed 1.2 million people, security forces make up only 0.78% of the total number of employees, which in March 2017 exceeded 153 million people . In the main European countries rates range from 0.68% in Germany to 1.05% in Italy, but generally remain below or within 1% of total employment. In Russia, where total employment does not exceed 75 million people, the share of security forces is close to 3.5%, which is four times higher than for most developed countries. If you compare this figure with other industries National economy, it turns out that it corresponds to the total number of employees in all medical organizations of the country, is slightly short of workers of all types of transport and is almost two and a half times higher than employment in the extraction of all types of minerals. For comparison: in the United States, employment rates in healthcare exceed the number of personnel in law enforcement agencies by 14 times.
Even more interesting are the crime statistics that these security forces are called upon to curb. In Russia, according to official data, 2.13 million crimes were registered in 2016, while in the United States - 9.18 million. This means that on average there were 2.33 registered crimes per Russian police officer, and 11 per American police officer. 5. Considering that the murder rate in Russia was only 30% lower than the American figure, the discrepancy in total number registered crimes more than four times seems, most likely, to be a consequence of different approaches to their registration and initiation of cases. I may be wrong, but it seems that even the gigantic police machine that is created in Russia today registers (and therefore recognizes as it can or wants to reveal) from a third to (in best case scenario) half of all crimes committed in the country.
It should also be noted that in Russia, unlike America or Europe, a huge place in the activities of security forces is occupied by economic crimes, which, for example, are absent as a class in American statistics, since tax services and courts investigate relevant cases without the participation of the police - and in most cases without arrests or detentions of entrepreneurs. The scale that investigations of this type of cases take in Russia is unprecedented in modern world and speaks of disproportionate interference in economic life. Not only do Russian law enforcement officers cost taxpayers significantly more than in any Western country, but they also cause enormous harm to them, sometimes paralyzing the work of even large companies. This applies to all Russian government regulation. For example, the Federal Antimonopoly Service opened 67,000 cases of violation of competition law in 2015, while similar agencies in the United States - 1,400 over 10 years (2006-2015). This is done in order to issue a fine not exceeding 100,000 rubles in most cases.
I deliberately do not touch on anything that almost always ends up in the center of domestic publications about our law enforcement system: corruption, violations of the law and citizens’ rights, the interest of police and other security officials in one or another solution to the issue, etc. As soon as we switch to At this level, we begin to try to understand whether the system is rotten or not, but for every negative example we can find a positive one and vice versa, and it seems to me that we will not come to any conclusion.
Something else is much more important. Today, Russian law enforcement agencies have reached, in my opinion, a critical moment in their development. Over the past 15 years, they have more than doubled in number, while the number of working-age citizens in the country has been declining. Their funding increased by more than 5.5 times. This has led to a number of positive changes, for example, to a significant reduction in the number of murders and some particularly serious crimes, but in most other areas there has been virtually no noticeable success. The evolution of Russian security forces has led, on the one hand, to the fact that they have become par excellence the guarantors of the preservation of the current political regime, and on the other hand, active economic entities building their own relationships with business structures. The effectiveness of their main activities - combating crime that actually exists in society, regulating migration, blocking channels for drugs entering the country, and even in some cases fighting terrorism - turns out to be extremely low. The reduction in funding for most law enforcement agencies announced this year raises extremely difficult questions to which the authorities, in my opinion, have no answer.
The experience of law enforcement in most countries indicates that force is rarely the main factor in their activities. Where professionalism is more important And efficient organization the work of the police themselves, on the one hand, and public trust in them, on the other.
In Russia today there is neither one nor the other. To a large extent, this was a consequence of the transformation of the security forces into a huge and growing, rich and getting richer corporation. And therefore, no matter who leads Russia into the future in 2018, 2024 or some other distant year, the task of turning security forces into law enforcement officers will remain, perhaps, the most significant of all for a long time.
Russia was recognized as the most police state in the world based on the ratio of the number of law enforcement officials per 100 thousand population. The ranking was compiled based on statistics from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.
