“In terms of values, I think that unfortunately the reforms have been a failure,” Daniel Ioannisian of the Union of Informed Citizens (UIC) told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “I’m saying this based on the events of the past year. The reforms should have resulted in citizens starting to perceive the police as a provider of services to the citizens, rather than a truncheon held by the state. They have failed in this regard.”
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has repeatedly said that his administration is successfully reforming the Armenian police and other law-enforcement bodies with the help of the European Union and the United States. In particular, Pashinian has touted the creation of the Patrol Service, a Western-funded police force which was supposed to introduce Western practices in road policing, street patrol and crowd control.
Both Ioannisian and Artur Sakunts, a veteran campaigner leading the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly (HCA), were critical of the Patrol Service’s track record, saying that has even worsened lately. Sakunts claimed that there have been more cases of its relatively well-paid officers physically and verbally abusing ordinary Armenians and not enforcing traffic rules.
The first chief of the Patrol Service was sacked in February following a bizarre traffic incident at Yerevan’s main square which sparked accusations of incompetence directed at his officers.
“The reforms have not been completed or put on hold,” insisted Armen Mkrtchian, a spokesman for the Armenian Interior Ministry. “They are a work in progress. True, problems do arise, but we must get better by addressing those problems.”
“We are introducing new services, new approaches to education, selection of personnel but … are also learning from our mistakes and shortcomings,” he said.
The reform process was coordinated by an ad hoc government body comprising not only government and law-enforcement officials but also civil society members. Ioannisian’s UIC, Sakunts’s HCA and another NGO pulled out of it in January in protest against Pashinian’s decision to appoint Vahe Ghazarian as interior minister. They claimed that Ghazarian, who is reportedly a childhood friend of Pashinian’s, resisted reforms and tolerated corruption in his previous capacity as chief of the Armenian police.
Another line of criticism comes from opposition figures and other detractors of Pashinian. They blame the police as well as the current government for considerable annual increases in Armenia’s crime rate registered since the 2018 “velvet revolution.”
Those have been driven in large measure by soaring drug trafficking cases in the country. Ghazarian said in October that the number of drug-related crimes recorded by the Armenian police more than doubled in the first nine months of this year.