Open Research Online The Open University’s repository of research publications and other research outputs Revisiting community policing in Ukraine: lessons for police reform Thesis How to cite: Chistyakova, Yulia (2010). Revisiting community policing in Ukraine: lessons for police reform. PhD thesis The Open University. For guidance on citations see FAQs. c 2010 The Author https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Version: Version of Record Link(s) to article on publisher’s website: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21954/ou.ro.0000ed47 Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. oro.open.ac.uk Vt--JRE.~.. :T'f'-:.\ (- \ <~ Revisiting Community Policing in Ukraine: Lessons for Police Reform Yulia Chistyakova Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Social Policy and Criminology 30 October 2009 1 ORIGINAL COpy TIGHTLY BOUND / Acknowledgements First of all I would like to thank the principal investigator of the project K that this thesis revisits, for giving his consent to use the original project data for secondary analysis, and for kindly agreeing to be interviewed in the course of this research. I would also like to thank my academic supervisors, Professor Gordon Hughes, Dr Louise Westmarland and Dr Deborah Talbot, without whose continued support, advice and encouragement this thesis would not have been possible. I am also very grateful to all the participants in the original project, for their agreement to participate in this study and for the generous support and advice they provided during my visit to Ukraine in the summer of2006. A very special thank you goes to Dr Annette Robertson who kindly offered to proof-read the thesis and whose help and support I greatly appreciate. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the Department of Applied Social Science at the University of Stirling for their support and encouragement. Finally, I would like to thank Gaston and Mila for their patience and support over the duration of this work - they are the main reason I did not give up. " - 9 SEP 1010 2 ABSTRACT This thesis critically revisits a project in community policing transfer to Ukraine. It examines the genesis, context and impact of the project and 'through this lens explores how community policing can be problematic in a former Soviet society. The study is intended to contribute to debates on the issues of reforming post-Soviet policing and the potential role of criminological imports in this process. The thesis highlights the obstacles to, and challenges of developing community policing within the context of the continued dominance and expanding scope of informal shadowy practices in the governance of policing. It demonstrates the importance of a combination of historical, economic, social and political factors impacting upon the willingness of people in Ukraine to contact the police and engage in crime prevention, and explores why people in Ukraine do not see themselves part of a 'community'. Normative questions posed by the notion of 'public engagement' are also explored. It is argued that 'community policing' as a consensual co­ production of order and safety is unlikely in Ukraine. Community policing practice in this context has a potential to evolve as an authoritarian, moralistic, coercive and exclusive form of control. The thesis challenges the assumption that export of community policing is an unproblematic transfer of expertise and 'best practice', and highlights the problematic nature of the relations between funders, academic entrepreneurs, the local police, academics and the non-governmental sector. The thesis also demonstrates how a commitment to scientific rationalism and a narrow conceptualisation of 'evidence' in evaluation research has political implications. 3 Table of contents Introduction 7 Chapter 1 Transferring community policing and the challenges of police reform in Ukraine: a review of the literature 13 The meanings of community policing 13 Public relations: trust, accountability and consultation 13 Responding to minor disorders and police discretion 15 Identifying risks, 'new penology', and community policing 17 The market and community polieing 18 From crime prevention to community safety 20 What constitutes a 'community' and social capital 20 Democracy and community policing 23 Community policing as a ~govemance' of crime 26 Police corruption and community policing 29 Policy transfer 32 Transfer and lesson drawing 32 Convergence, divergence and local context 34 Policy flows and translation 36 Geo-histories, criminological imports and evidence-based policy 38 Reforming the Ukrainian police: inspirations? 40 The communist and the Anglo-Saxon models of policing 40 Difficulties of comparing and contrasting 42 Trends and continuities in policing 46 The challenges of transforming police public relations in Ukraine 47 Legacies of the Soviet legal order 47 Police reform: the lack of implementation 48 Soviet criminology: the lack of expertise? 50 The performance m~8$ures and recording practices of the Ukrainian police 51 The police and human rights 51 Disciplining citizens: the legacies of the Soviet collective 53 Law and order and the new providers of security 54 Compromised institutions and transitional justice 55 Corruption, the 'captured state' and the criminal-political nexus 56 Competitive authoritarianism 59 Conclusion 60 Chapter 2 Methodology 63 The K project 63 What the thesis is about 67 The theoretical trajectories adopted by the thesis 68 What aspects of the K project are not being used and wby 73 What aspects of the K project are being used and why 75 The choice of methods 79 Analysis of documents 82 Observation 85 Researching corruption 89 Interviews with former participants (June 2006) 91 Revisiting original interview data 94 Secondary analysis of the K survey data 96 4 Problems of secondary analysis 97 Memory and truth 99 Being self-critical 102 Transition to the role of critical researcher 103 Ethical aspects: consent and anonymity 106 Conclusion 109 Chapter 3 The K project: its origins and actors 112 The K project - a story of academic entrepreneurship 114 Police professionals - the heads of the experimental police divisions 121 K University 124 The Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine 125 The British Council . 128 TheNGOs 129 The researchers 133 Elected officials 139 Conclusion 140 Chapter 4 Revisiting K: theory and research 144 The K project's theory of community policing 145 Research methods 150 Choosing the experimental areas 150 The 3-phase research design 151 The policy strategy 153 A critique of the philosophy, or normative foundations of the project: a lack of debate 154 A critique of theory 158 Criteria for revisiting the research design/methodology of the K project 165 Understanding the context 167 Participation, collaboration and emancipation 171 Experimental or realist evaluation1 174 Interpretation and use of the survey data: the limits 178 Interpreting police-public relationships 181 Conclusion 185 Chapter 5 Reforming the Ukrainian police 187 Bureaucratic barriers to reform: negotiating police reorganisation 189 Performance pressures 196 Corruption and the 'captured state' 201 Rule-making - how new rules create new bribe and extortion 206 opportunities The 'extortion pyramid' 208 Petty corruption and selective sanctions as an instrument of control 212 State capture and resources 216 Corruption as an 'intractable power' 219 Police and the young people: enforcing the law against the poor 223 Detention and abuse of power 226 Fragmentation of the elite and 'short time horizon' 23fT MUlti-agency working: mission impossible 233 Conclusion 239 5 Chapter 6 The public and community policing in Ukraine Introduction 243 Public engagement in K 247 Was it possible to improve the image of the police and public confidence? 249 Difficulty of per§uading the public to inform: memories and fean 261 An empirical illustration: beat meetings in K 265 The post-Soviet experiences and civic activity in Ukraine 267 Social capital and civil society 274 Human rights' NGOs and bonding capitalin Ukraine 279 Tolerance of corruption 287 'Law and order' and citizen mobilisations 292 The commercialisation of security and gated communities 297 o,nclusion 301 General Conclusions 305 The contribution the thesis makes to transnational policing,research 305 The contribution the thesis makes to discourses on international policy 308 transfer The contribution the thesis makes to critical understandings of building 309 and maintaining civil society in post-Soviet satellites The contribution the thesis makes to critical undentanding of 'rights 310 consciousnesses' in post-Soviet satellites The contribution the thesis makes to furthering a critical undentanding 311 of evaluation research Limitations of this research 312 Suggestions for further research 313 Bibliography 315 Appendix 1 Interview schedule 346 6 Introduction How can people liberate themselves from the legacies of an authoritarian past? How can societies like Ukraine emerging from the Soviet system, re-conceptualise and rebuild their law and order institutions? The party-state is long gone, but has the police, its former armed hand, changed, or will change ever be possible? Is this too big a task for a society deeply divided by views of its history, feeling both haunted and nostalgic about the Soviet past, cynical about the present and sceptical about the future? A society that is struggling to come to an understanding of what brings it together and where is the way forward. And in any case are there not more urgent concerns for a country struggling economically, immersed in endless battles between political elites, and gripped by crime and corruption? In 2000-2003, I travelled to the city of Kharkiv 1 in Ukraine a number of times as part of a British-Ukrainian research team that carried out a three-year pilot project on community policing. As a Russian who has spent a few years abroad, it was an exciting prospect for me to be part of the team undertaking an experiment to reform the Ukrainian police.