Public security police to patrol Ukrainian streets again

It is rare to see a police patrol on the streets of large Ukrainian cities. Meanwhile, regional centers, small towns, and villages have not seen policemen walking the beat since the Soviet era. Statistics say that today public security police patrol just one-fifth of Ukraine’s territory, mostly in the big cities. However, the Ministry of Internal Affairs conducted an experiment last year, which it says proved the effectiveness of police patrols. Volodymyr Mayevsky, chief of the Department of Public Security Police, claims that the streets where the experiment was conducted were in fact crime-free. “Even if an occasional crime was committed, it was solved before the trail got cold,” Mayevsky says.

Based on the results, which pleasantly surprised the police, a bill has been drafted to reform the public security police. The document, unveiled at an interior ministry briefing last Wednesday, states that the new patrol details will generally consist of seven law enforcers: a chief officer, three representatives from the former city patrol service, and an equal number from the former road patrol service. “There will be 19,000 patrolmen,” said Volodymyr Rudnyk, chief of the Public Security Police, “with 299 details covering 35-40 percent of all the Ukrainian regions.” These units will be manned by former traffic policemen, who lost their jobs after the State Traffic Police was reformed, and former patrol service officers who have completed professional upgrading courses.

In Kyiv and various regional centers these patrol units will maintain law and order and will have the right to draw up administrative offense reports without the need to take the offender to the police station. In small cities and villages, policemen on the beat will maintain order on roads and draw up accident reports. In addition, a civic institution of 13,000 neighborhood patrollers, known in the past as druzhynnyky, is already at work. There are also plans to increase patrolmen’s wages from the current 600 to 900 hryvnias a month. Street guardians of public order will also hold the rank of commissioned or, at the very least, non-commissioned officer, and they will be known as inspectors, not policemen.

The bill is expected to be discussed at the next session of the Verkhovna Rada. The Ministry of Internal Affairs hopes that this bill will not go the way of the traffic police reform bill, which is still hanging in mid-air.