Citat:
Ukraine is shuttering its traffic police department entirely and firing all of its officers. In its stead, the government is rolling out a new, community-oriented police force – training Mr. Kuzhekyn and some 2,000 others under Western instructors – that will break from corrupt practices of the past and drawing on techniques that the project overseer, new Deputy Interior Minister Eka Zguladze, used to succeed in her native Georgia 10 years ago.
...
The new patrol service is scheduled to hit the streets of Kiev on July 1 with 2,000 freshly trained officers, chosen from more than 30,000 applications. And from the start, the service is designed to filter out graft: instead of paying several thousand dollars in bribes to secure a slot, applicants must pass vigorous physical exams and aptitude tests.
The old traffic police model, where officers stand on the side of the highway, will be abandoned completely. Instead, patrol units will act much like duty officers in the US, responding to community issues like with domestic violence, speeding, or street fights.
...
Like police in Ukraine, those in Georgia were notorious for extracting bribes from the public to supplement their meager state salaries, says Eka Gigauri, the executive director of Transparency International in Georgia. Georgia’s reforms immediately addressed this issue by raising the salaries of the new recruits by nearly 10 times the previous amount.
“The salary change was the most successful part of the reform, because it made the police care about their jobs,” Ms. Gigauri says in a telephone interview from her office in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. “We really could see immediately that the new police were helpful and friendly, and you could feel it was a new type of service. It was an exercise in building public trust and it worked.”
Ukraine’s reforms will raise the starting salaries of the patrol officers from 2,000 Ukrainian hryvnia a month, or about $95, to 8,000 hryvnia, or $380. Whereas traffic police had to pay for their patrol car's gas and their own notebooks to write up reports, the new patrols will be issued supplies.
