The Iraqi police force remains riddled with corruption and incompetence, a year after the Bush administration declared the “year of the police” in a campaign to make the cop on the beat a trusted law enforcement officer.
“There remains a significant shortfall in the abilities of the Iraqi police forces in the area of leadership, personnel, training and equipment in my area,” Army Col. Paul Funk, a brigade commander in Iraq, told reporters at the Pentagon.
Such Pentagon teleconferences, featuring American commanders from Iraq, tend to be upbeat. Funk’s blunt appraisal last week underscored the fact that among components of the 328,000-strong Iraqi Security Forces, its 135,000-police officer force lags behind the army, border patrol and special forces in overall performance.
Recent reports add credence to what Funk said. Iraqis see the force as more loyal to warring Sunni or Shiite insurgents than to the public.
The Pentagon’s quarterly Iraq stability report in March said U.S.-trained police “often disregarded” prisoner release orders signed by judges. Police “also remain prone to intimidation by or collusion with militias and criminal gangs, thereby decreasing the confidence among ordinary Iraqis in their legitimate security force,” it said.
Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who conducted a fact-finding tour of Iraq last month, filed a trip report that said, “The police force is feared as a Shia militia in uniform which is responsible for thousands of extra-judicial killings.”
The Defense Department’s stability report found that local provincial governments hired police who had no training, rather than accepting the latest graduates from the country’s 12 police academies.
The off-the-street hiring is a perfect opportunity for insurgents, such as the Shiite Mahdi Army, to infect the police with its operatives, said Robert Maginnis, a retired Army officer and military analyst.
“Police are more infiltrated with bad guys because they have to live in the communities they police,” he said. In contrast, army soldiers live and train within a somewhat insular organization to achieve unit cohesion.
Funk, the brigade commander, oversees a 900-square-mile area around northern Baghdad and 1,000 Iraqi policemen. The Ministry of Interior continues to struggle on basic functions such as paying and equipping its officers,” he said, causing many to quit in response.
In a bright spot, tribal sheikhs in Sunni-dominated Anbar Province, west of Baghdad, have put out the call for members to join the police, in defiance of al-Qaida in Iraq. The ranks of Anbar police shot up, from 1,300 a year ago to 13,200 today.
