There is even a T-shirt honoring the town’s signal event: “If the government can’t help people,” it reads, “It doesn’t have the right to forbid them from defending themselves — Sagra 2011.”
The choke-point of the Skirmish at Sagra and surprise for Sergei the Gypsy.
Russian Village’s Self-Defense Underlines Failures of Police
Money quote:
“The police are corrupt or lazy or politicized, and it’s the same all across the country,” said Konstantin M. Kiseyov, academic secretary of the Institute of Philosophy and Law in Yekaterinburg, which is 25 miles from the village. “So people must protect themselves. They can’t count on the government or its structures. That is why the country is turning into one big Sagra.”
Here's another:
But although corruption, inefficiency and sheer laziness can be factors in poor policing, a more fundamental issue makes significant reform unlikely, said Mr. Kosals of the Higher School of Economics. The underlying problem is that the security forces in Russia are structured to safeguard the social order rather than to protect and serve citizens, he said.
“We can find many motivated people with high skills in the Russian police,” he said, “but the system makes it difficult even for these good police officers to do their jobs well. Their main burden is to control situations and to control the people rather than to help them.” As a result, he said: “People turn to their neighbors and to relatives and local networks to solve their problems by themselves. It’s some sort of lynch law. And in Russia we have thousands of such cases.”
And isn't that the problem with today's cops in America?
2 comments:
So the main difference between Russians and Americans is that Russians have the ability to recognize a problem and deal with it?
So, who has those T-shirts, especially if they them in the original Russian expression Cyrillc letters along with the English translation?
I hope their sense of capitalism is as strong as their sense of community.
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