Region shares similar corruption issues within police

BELGRAD - Transparency, internal contril and more integrity are key in solving the problem of corruption in the police forces of the region, which share similar issues, according to the conclusion of the conference on responsibility in police work in Western Balkans, held on Friday.

Participants of the meeting organised by the Regional Network of Civil Society Organisations Pointplus stressed that the countries of the region faced similar corruption issues when it came to employment in police, adding that it was often politically influenced.

The civil sector believes transparency, internal control and improvements to integrity are the solution for those problems.

According to an OSCE survey, the Serbian police is among the top 5 most corrupt parts of the government, with 35 percent having confidence in the police, less than the year before, surveyor of the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy Sasa Djordjevic said.

The trust in the police in Kosovo is at 43 percent, in Montenegro it is 44 and in Bosnia-Herzegovina it is 55, Djordjevic noted.

"The efficiency of the police is not based on statistical data, but on whether the people trust it and feel protected," he explained, stressing that the announced new police law should solve some of the problems.

"As for the situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina, we have pretty high rate of confidence in the police force there, but only 20-25 percent when it comes to the judiciary," Secretary General of the Centre for Security Studies from Sarajevo Denis Hadzovic said.

The police situation is fairly good, considering that it is a complex constitutional system that comprises 22 police forces that are pretty autonomous, he remarked.

In the past year, 67 percent of...