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Police Salaries to Triple Under Landmark Reform

Police officers' salaries will triple and their work will face tighter public scrutiny under a sweeping overhaul of the country's police force ordered by President Dmitry Medvedev, officials said Wednesday.

State Duma Deputy Alexander Gurov said the plans mark the biggest reform of the police since the Soviet collapse and compared its urgency with an incident in the 1970s when he shot dead a lion as a young police lieutenant.

The lion, which was named King and had starred in several popular Soviet films, was living with a Moscow family when it got loose. Gurov shot the animal as it was preparing to pounce on a pedestrian on the street.

“The lion is already in the corner, and we have to act fast," Gurov, a United Russia member who sits on the Duma's Security Committee, said of the police reform.

"Everything that we did before was not a reform but light patchwork," he told The Moscow Times.

Tatyana Moskaltsova, a Duma deputy with United Russia and a retired police major general, said the reform would boost the salaries of police officers to 70,000 rubles ($2,350) a month from the current $600 to $800.

Her announcement echoed that of Moscow police chief Vladimir Kolokoltsev, who said in an interview published Wednesday that a rank-and-file Moscow policeman would earn 60,000 rubles ($2,060) a month by the end of 2011.

Now, Kolokoltsev said, the average Moscow police officer collects about $800 a month in pay. The average national salary for any worker across Russia is about $800 a month, according to the Federal Statistics Service.

“We have to be realists,” Kolokoltsev told Rossiiskaya Gazeta. “Until the conditions of service change, people won’t be lining up to work in the police.”

He said 22,000 employees would be laid off the city's 98,000-member police force by late 2011.

After a series of scandals involving violent and corrupt police officers grabbed national headlines through most of last year, Medvedev ordered a broad reform of the 1.2 million-member Interior Ministry in December. He demanded that its work force be slashed by 20 percent and salaries increased for the remaining workers. Higher salaries are seen as an incentive to prevent police officers from taking bribes, a widespread practice in Russia.

Medvedev also called for police officers to be relieved of some of their peripheral duties and for improvements to the recruiting process.

Medvedev signed a Feb. 18 decree entrusting the Interior Ministry itself with developing a new law on the police — the legal framework for the reform — and to submit it to the Duma by year-end. The new legislation will replace a 1991 law that has been criticized by senior police officers as lagging behind the social and legal changes that have occurred over the past two decades.

Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev is to discuss the basics of the new legislation with the Duma's Security Committee on Thursday.

Among the issues that Nurgaliyev might raise is a provision in the bill that would allow the Public Chamber to exercise oversight over the work of the police by examining whether decrees, orders and other police-related documents infringe on civil rights. Deputy Interior Minister Sergei Bulavin shared the provision at a round table Tuesday.

The bill also would require that top local police officials regularly report to regional and municipal legislatures, while district police officers would be obliged to regularly report to local communities, Kommersant reported Wednesday.

The Interior Ministry wants to ditch many functions that duplicate the functions of other government agencies, Bulavin said, citing as examples the extradition of illegal migrants, the annual technical examination of vehicles, helping court marshals collect from debtors and looking for military draft dodgers. Earlier this year, the police were stripped of their right to manage drunk tanks, while the Moscow police became the first in Russia to stop inspecting retail markets and checking whether traders have the proper documents to work there.

Bulavin also said the new legislation would require new recruits to obtain recommendations from officers in active service and to pass drug and psychological tests.

One police officer called a monthly salary of 60,000 rubles "very good money" but expressed doubt that the reform would go through. “They will never allow cuts to the staff at central headquarters,” said the police officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

A fellow police officer, standing nearby on watch at a metro station, joked about the reform. "If they pull it off, it will be the end of the world," he said.

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