With a stick through life

The police abandoned the cane system and changed the form of reporting. It got worse

The chairman of the Ekaterinburg HOA "Kvartal", 60-year-old Viktor Doronin, was very fond of his young wife Elena. And she loved to spend the money of the HOA for her needs and used the general account as her checkbook, even bought dresses, cosmetics and pads, Doronin's neighbors complained to Newsweek. In October 2008, the Doronins were removed from the board and filed a complaint with the police. A criminal case was opened against the ex-chairman. “The woman immediately left him, he took to drink and died in March, the usual story,” says his friend Pavel. Two weeks after Doronin's death, the criminal case was dismissed, and a report was sent to the authorities on the disclosure of 64 embezzlements committed by him on an especially large scale.

In the language of operatives, this is called "cutting the stick." The more sticks, the better the reporting, which means more bonuses and easier promotion. The easiest way is with the dead. The same Doronin was involved in one criminal case - embezzlement. In court, this would be one sentence and one solved crime.

But there will be no trial: therefore, the operatives divide this only theft into many small episodes and start a separate criminal case for each. And if there are still unsolved thefts, then he can also be blamed for them. And then just close the case, or rather, there are many cases at once on the fact of the death of the accused. But all these crimes are officially considered solved. With Doronin, this is already a confirmed fact. "63 crimes were registered illegally, only for the sake of improving service statistics," says Olga Teterina, a spokeswoman for the Sverdlovsk Region Prosecutor's Office.

A stick is a form No. 1 card with data on a detected crime. Cards are added to departmental statistics. Until January, the system worked like this: the indicators for each type of crime were compared with the same period last year, and in this way the work of the departments was evaluated and a plan was formed for the future. The technology is simple: 100 robberies were uncovered at the site in July 2009—this will be the plan for July 2010.

Last January, with the cancellation of the famous order No. 650, which describes this system, the reform of the Ministry of Internal Affairs began. Quantity will give way to quality, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev promised. An alternative order No. 25 appeared: to evaluate the work of the police according to 72 indicators, 10 directions, 55 indicators, and at the same time take into account the opinion of the population. It is not clear how to take into account, there are no criteria. In Barnaul, for example, police officers were instructed to collect letters of thanks from relatives.

It only got worse, according to Newsweek interlocutors in various departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. As a result, sticks were not canceled, but no one understood how to work with the new reporting system, and the authorities, being reinsured, lowered inflated plans. The new order has the same problems as the old one, says sociologist Asmik Novikova, scientific director of the project “Reform of the Police Performance Evaluation System”, it is framed differently, but the approach is the same: the more crimes are solved, the more healthy the society supposedly will be. The quality of the work of the police is not taken into account—the result is recorded.

In April, Yuri Chaika was indignant: despite the reform, the cane system in the Ministry of Internal Affairs is alive and well. From the inflated police reports, federal reporting is then added, and from this picture it is impossible to understand what the true state of affairs with crime is. In June, the check in the Urals ended. It turned out that last year the Ural policemen made 935 refusal decisions in criminal cases in connection with the death of suspects or defendants, of which the prosecutor's office recognized 39% as unfounded.

The Prosecutor General's Office is now conducting similar inspections throughout the country. “The worst fears are confirmed: in order to keep a job and not get laid off during the reform, the statistics are further inflated with non-existent crimes,” says a Newsweek source in the Prosecutor General’s Office.

In the Urals, machinations with statistics were revealed by Tatyana Domracheva, Major of the Central Internal Affairs Directorate for the Sverdlovsk Region. During one of the planned inspections, she discovered that the Central Internal Affairs Directorate was renting out land belonging to him to merchants, and reported this to her superiors. Then they began to put pressure on her and survive from work. Defending herself, Domracheva collected information about hundreds of dubious criminal cases.

Domracheva writes to the prosecutor's office: "Even the North Caucasus region, where unsolved crimes are attributed to killed militants, is far from the scale of the falsifications of our police department." She backs up each such appeal with the numbers of criminal cases committed, as a rule, by the dead. "Domracheva's arguments are fully confirmed," this is the regional prosecutor Yuri Ponomarev, writing to the Prosecutor General's Office. The candidacy of the head of the Sverdlovsk Central Internal Affairs Directorate, Mikhail Nikitin, was seriously considered for the position of head of the criminal investigation department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs because of his good performance, a source in the ministry’s apparatus confirms, but because of the scandal, everyone has slowed down so far.

Failure to fulfill the plan, as well as overfulfillment, is fraught with problems. "Little revealed-weak work, a lot-a surge in crime, again weak," explains one of the operatives of the Central Internal Affairs Directorate of Moscow. The police are not interested in working beyond the plan, this leads to increased obligations in the future. But what if the plan fails? “We don’t have drug users and sellers left for 15,000 people—everyone is already in prison,” complains a drug police officer from a small town in the Altai Territory. And for precinct police officers, alcoholics, psychos and the same deceased become a convenient contingent.

District police officer Sergei Belousov from Izhevsk is accused of abuse of power and official forgery. The captain issued five protocols for living without registration and appearing drunk in a public place to a local disabled schizophrenic who has long been in a psychiatric clinic. In the Yaroslavl region, three precinct officers brought to administrative responsibility the dead and prisoners already serving time.

Another thing is when the unit does not have enough sticks for more serious crimes - robberies, thefts, bribes. In this case, simply fabricating the protocol is no longer enough. We need a criminal and witnesses. And operatives force quite law-abiding citizens to commit crimes by deceit, blackmail or force. In every region of Russia, criminal cases are now being investigated against police officers who increased their service statistics with fake criminal cases.

The investigative department of the Investigative Committee for Moscow has already opened the fourth criminal case against the operatives of the Otradnoye police department in the capital. Among the accused are the former head of the police department, Vasily Antonenko, and three of his subordinates. According to the investigation, the police detained Muscovite Alexander Chesnokov, who got lost in local garages. It was decided that he wanted to steal something there. At the police station, he was beaten and offered a choice: stealing from garages, possession of drugs, or shoplifting. Chesnokov chose the latter.

He was brought to the mall, picked out by a single girl, and forced to steal her purse. “A criminal case was opened against him under the article “robbery”—that’s how they earned another stick,” says the investigator of the Investigative Committee for Moscow. The Butyrskaya prosecutor's office refused to approve the case and began checking against the policemen themselves. It turned out that this was not the first time. Shortly before this, Alexey Ryumin, a Muscovite, stole a handbag in the same shopping center.

Closed case, reporting is an intradepartmental currency. The most expensive are robberies, arms trafficking, taking a bribe and a crime committed by a group of people, says the prosecutor who oversees the police. For such sticks you can get a promotion and a new rank. “Sticks can be bought, sold, exchanged and donated,” says the interlocutor in the Investigative Committee. Disclosure of "illicit arms trafficking" costs $10,000, says Moscow police operative. To donate a stick, you need county approval, he explains, to transfer a stick to another county, you need support at the city level, etc. ourselves."

The police take risks by fabricating serious crimes, but it's worth it. The Investigative Committee for the Voronezh Region is investigating a case against local UBEP operatives Alexei Dikunov and Alexei Dubachev. They are accused of abuse of official powers, provocation to receive a bribe and official forgery. According to investigators, the policemen invested 3,000 rubles in a box of chocolates and asked their friend to take the present to the head of the local tax inspectorate. And then they accused the taxman of taking a bribe. And in Stavropol, city detective Valery Tolkachev hid explosives in a park—and then found them himself.