Thread by @ChrisO_wiki

1/ Russia has become a police state without enough police, due to a crisis in policing caused in part by the war in Ukraine. Poor salaries, lack of funding, political purges and a focus on punishing political dissent are resulting in murders and rapes going unpunished.

2/ BBC News reports on the dismal situation of Russia's police forces, which face a massive drop in numbers. Although Russia has 900,000 police – 630 officers per 100,000 people, more than twice the figure for the US or UK – it's not enough.

3/ Officers blame a lack of funding, which has made it more profitable for them to leave and work as taxi drivers or couriers, and has meant that some have to use their own cars and buy their own equipment.

4/ The Ministry of the Interior has been unable to fill tens of thousands of vacancies. To make matters worse, the FSB has carried out a purge of officers believed to be supporters of the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, including many experienced policemen.

5/ The war in Ukraine has led to a mass diversion of police effort away from serious crimes towards political offences. Officers say they are investigating "endless charges against people discrediting the army".

6/ A former police major from Tomsk says: "Everyone's gone to check on some grandma who saw a curtain that looked like the Ukrainian flag." (The thread below lists many such incidents.)

https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1661313281930215426

7/ As well as resulting in violent crimes not being investigated or solved, the crisis is leading to a surge in police violence and corruption, as officers attempt to beat confessions out of suspects and carry out arbitrary arrests to meet quotas.

8/ The situation is also affecting Russia's ability to control the areas it occupies in Ukraine. The Interior Ministry says it needs an extra 40,000 officers just to police Donetsk and Luhansk, let alone Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. /end

Source:
bbc.co.uk/news/world-eur…