The column is led by Alexander Kukolevsky

// THE PROBLEM IS OUT

In October, Russian police shot each other and civilians three times. Psychologists have been tasked with making police officers less aggressive. However, at the same time, police officers are being taught skills that make the task of psychologists almost impossible.

After the April story with Major Yevsyukov, the police did not carry out causeless massacres for a long time, but in October they seemed to have decided to make up for lost time.

On October 12, in Omsk, 21-year-old police lieutenant Alexander Mets left his post without permission, came to visit his fiancée and killed her with his service pistol. Then he got into a friend’s taxi, shot him, threw his body on one of the city streets, after which he drove out of town in the same car and shot himself.

On October 24, in Kyzyl, the detective of the Department for Economic Crimes of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Tuva, 25-year-old senior lieutenant Ayan Pavlov, did not show up for instructions, and his superiors began searching for him. Soon two traffic police officers stopped his car. The lieutenant driving the car was drunk. The police officers put him in their car and took him for a medical examination. Pavlov took out his service pistol, killed one, seriously wounded another policeman and shot himself.

On October 25, in Tuva, the traffic police crew stopped a Zhiguli, which was driven by a 17-year-old student of the 11th grade of a local school (as the investigation reported, in a drunken state), and in the passenger seat was his classmate. Inspector Borbak-ool Bair demanded that the student get out of the car, to which he, as reported in the press release of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, “made threats and took out an object that looked like a pistol from his jacket” (the police later reported that they found it at the scene of the incident “ dummy firearm"). A traffic cop from a Makarov service vehicle shot him in the neck, the bullet went right through and hit the girl in the stomach. On October 28, the student died, his companion is still in intensive care, and doctors said that the teenagers were sober. A criminal case has been initiated against Bair under Part 3 of Art. 286 of the Criminal Code (abuse of official authority, committed with the use of weapons). He is suspended from service during the investigation. The Ministry of Internal Affairs of Tuva believes that the traffic cop acted correctly, within the limits of necessary self-defense.

After the first Tuvan incident, Dmitry Medvedev instructed the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Rashid Nurgaliev, to remove the head of the Tuvan police, Viktor Lesnyak, from his post. The minister himself stated that “it is necessary to reconsider the approaches of psychologists when studying personnel, to tighten the criteria for conducting a psychological assessment of police officers” and ordered the personnel service to quickly develop a methodology for moral and psychological examination of employees. He said the same thing almost verbatim after the massacre carried out by Yevsyukov. So Nurgaliev assigns the main role in preventing the execution of civilians to psychologists. And everything would be fine, but there is one problem: while psychologists are trying to convince police officers that violence is evil, their leadership intends to teach their employees exactly the opposite.

On October 29, police exercises took place in the Moscow region, at which Nurgaliev was also present. As Interfax reported, according to legend, in a certain locality a large group of pensioners went to an unauthorized rally and blocked the federal highway. Using stun grenades, tear gas and the latest water-jet vehicles "Groza" and "Storm", the police scattered the protesters within a few minutes, and detained some of them. However, later the Ministry of Internal Affairs denied this information: it turns out that these were not exercises, but a demonstration of technical innovations, and the legend was that the highway was blocked not by pensioners, but by extremist-minded citizens throwing stones at the police. However, this does not change the essence: such classes turn employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs into very thankless material for psychologists.

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