The Interior Ministry started a nationwide public relations campaign this week to burnish its tarnished image, posting billboards showing respectable cops and Internet ads promoting reported acts of police heroism.

“We couldn’t sit and wait while there is a flow of negative information. It is not clear why society doesn’t react to cases where police officers risk their lives for people,” Interior Ministry spokesman Oleg Yelnikov told The Moscow Times.

More than 400 police were killed on duty in 2009, he said.

The campaign comes as Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev is preparing to report back to President Dmitry Medvedev on his plans to reform the ministry, which has been seriously discredited in the public eye by a wave of violent crime and corruption scandals.

The ministry launched a new feature on its web site — the Calendar of Courage — to highlight brave acts by officers. The log goes back to April 27, 2009, the day that Moscow police major Denis Yevsyukov went on a shooting spree in a supermarket, killing two and wounding six.

The incident was initially written off by ministry officials as an isolated incident, prompting several news outlets to begin tracking police-related violence. The Russian edition of Esquire, owned by Independent Media Sanoma Magazines, the parent company of The Moscow Times, maintains a regular calendar of police crime.

According to Interior Ministry figures, police committed more than 5,000 crimes in 2009, an 11 percent increase from the previous year. About 2,000 officers were fired for various violations.

Yelnikov stopped short of blaming the media for orchestrating a campaign against the Interior Ministry, however.

"The police’s image is not discredited by society, the media or human rights activists, but by individual police officers,” he said.

 The most recent example on the Interior Ministry calendar, dated Wednesday, reported the case of officers in the southern city of Orlov, who saved the life of a pensioner. Police found the man near death after his relatives reported him missing, the report said.

Meanwhile, more than 1,000 people, including city police chief Vladimir Kolokoltsev, turned out to mourn patrolman Denis Klimovich, who was killed during a traffic stop Saturday.

Separately, the privately owned DTV television channel launched a humorous, police-friendly sitcom on Monday. The show, "Odnazhdy v Militsii," was promoted with an aggressive Internet campaign featuring an officer destroying his computer out of professional frustration.