After the American military surge eradicated the Taliban leadership in 2002, German police officers have been training Afghan colleagues in Kabul. The quality of the mission conducted, however, has been atrocious, according to a report.

More than 80,000 Afghan police forces have been trained over the years, in an effort that has, so far, cost approximately half a billion euros. However, it is an investment that appears to make a mockery of any ROI prediction model.

This is according to internal US documents that have been published by the Washington Post. Germany, on the other hand, has never conducted a systematic and independent evaluation of the operation.

The documents published by the Post are mainly focusing on alleged mistakes by the US in Afghanistan. However, Germany’s contribution or lack thereof is also part of the piece, as the internal documents show the US’ frustration with the German ally. Germany was “too slow” was doing “too little” and was setting the “wrong priorities.”

In fact, according to the documents, the German mission was failure ab initio. Already in August 2003, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote in a memo regarding German efforts that these were insufficient and that Berlin needed to be put “under pressure” in order for the Germans to conduct a “better, faster job.”

The documents in question come from the “Special Inspector General for the Reconstruction of Afghanistan” (Sigar). The US agency has interviewed more than 600 policymakers in Afghanistan: military, diplomats, aid workers. The Washington Post enforced in court that most of the interviews were released. In addition, the newspaper obtained the release of government documents.

These show that Berlin was tasked to set up a police academy in Kabul to train several hundred police officers to German standards over the years. Robert Finn, ex-ambassador to Kabul, sneered in a Sigar interview that it was “great,” but unfortunately, Afghanistan would not have needed a few hundred, but 10,000 officers – “yesterday.”

Richard Boucher, a former high-ranking diplomat in the US State Department, also criticized the German ally for Sigar employees. He informed police officers in the hope that they would affect the behavior of the lower ranks. An illusion as it turned out. When Boucher flew to Afghanistan in 2006, he found “virtually no trained Afghan police officer.”

The Americans interviewed in no way shift the blame for their failure. Douglas Lute, a principal Afghanistan advisor to Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, openly admits: “We lacked a basic understanding of Afghanistan – we did not know what we were doing.”

The challenge was “vastly underestimated,” Germany’s Green politician Nachtwei says. A high-ranking delegation from ministries, the police, and the Federal Intelligence Service has already described the training needs of the Afghan police as “almost unlimited” after a trip to Kabul in 2002. According to Nachtwei, the German efforts were “grossly undersized.” Nachtwei was a member of the Bundestag from 1994 to 2009 and traveled to Afghanistan almost every year.

The documents moreover show that seven out of ten Afghan police officers were illiterate and unable to read legal texts or investigate. Attempts to curb corruption have been mainly unsuccessful. In retrospect, practitioners who have been deployed to Afghanistan several times, even believe that Germany “has taken on an unsolvable task under the rule of law.” However, Berlin seemed impervious and focussed solely on the symbolic gesture, in a mission that has turned “German efficiency” ad absurdum, it appears.

L'articolo Germany’s Failed Police Mission in Afghanistan proviene da InsideOver.

It is dangerous being a police officer, and in more ways than one. This is a fact that France is painfully waking up to at the moment, with the country facing a very disconcerting rise in police suicides. 64 French gendarmes have taken their own lives so far in 2019. What’s particularly alarming about this figure is that it surpasses the number of officers who have died in the line of duty.

Not only that, but the current suicide rate among the gendarmerie is 36% higher than that of the general population. Denis Jacob, the head of the Alternative Police CFDT union, predicts that this difference is likely to become more pronounced in the coming months: “given the situation today, 2019 could be the worst [for officer suicides] in the last 30 years.”

The picture is looking bleak for France, yet French authorities are at a loss to explain exactly why stress levels are mounting among police. A parliamentary inquiry published in July highlighted a range of reasons, ranging from outdated resources to the precipitous rise of unpaid overtime. Still, it didn’t pinpoint anything especially conclusive or penetrating, with report author and En Marche parliamentarian, Jean-Michel Fauvergue, writing: “Many of the women and men serving in the police or gendarmerie work in deplorable conditions, stemming notably from the dilapidation of police buildings.”

Aside from focusing on poor equipment, poor lodgings, poor working hours, poor pay, poor support, and all the other mundane yet insidious reasons why police officers become stressed, French authorities should also look to situations in other countries. Because rising levels of police stress and suicide aren’t restricted only to France.

In the United States, police deaths by suicide have outnumbered deaths in the line of duty for three consecutive years, with the toll for 2018 being 167. In the United Kingdom, the number of police officers taking sick days off work as a result of stress and anxiety has doubled in five years, while 21 officers died by suicide in England and Wales in 2017 (the latest year for which there’s data).

And it’s not just the UK or the US: Russia, Canada, and India are all confronting their own issues of rising or already high police suicides. Once again, the same factors of overwork, under-support and trauma are at play in these cases, but in attempting to understand the marked rise happening in nations such as France, it’s worth pointing to one other significant factor.

This is the vital yet neglected issue of legitimacy and public perception. In France, the police have long been the subject of derision or outright hostility, and things have only been exacerbated since the beginning of Yellow Vest protests last November. In April, such protestors reportedly urged officers to commit suicide during heated confrontations, and while it’s unlikely that most Gilet Jaunes take their rhetoric this far when dealing with the police, this episode is indicative of how the public perception of French authorities has soured significantly in recent months.

Because of the brutal tactics and “excessive force” that French police have sometimes used in dealing with the Yellow Vest protests, they have increasingly come to be viewed as tools of the political and economic system protesters are railing against. In contrast to the 2015 Paris terror attacks (which briefly strengthened the view of police as ‘heroes’), they are being perceived as villains, which, in conjunction with the multitude of stresses already attached to policing, has made some police officers feel dangerously undervalued and overwhelmed.

The role of public legitimacy becomes more evident when examples outside of France are also examined. In the UK, a parliamentary report found that public trust in the police has been “severely dented” in recent years as a result of cuts to forces, while in the US there have been significant issues with trust in police in recent years, especially with levels of trust among young people, African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities. In America’s case, public confidence in police sank to a record-equalling low of 52% in June 2015, against the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter movement and the police shootings of unarmed black men in Ferguson, New York City, and North Charleston.

That trust dropped at this time is significant, and given that such questions of legitimacy haven’t really been resolved (the latest Gallup poll still puts trust at only 57%), it’s perhaps not surprising that suicide rates were higher than on-call deaths in 2016, 2017 and 2018. Of course, being a police officer is already stressful enough as it is, but when a palpable sense of public distrust or animosity is added to the mix, it can increase the burdens that policemen and women have to carry.

That’s why, aside from simply improving working conditions, increasing budgets and offering more personal support, any nation with a police suicide problem should take a long hard look at itself, and ask why the public bears so much ill will towards the force tasked with defending it and its social order. It just may be that this order needs fundamental overhaul, and that rather than getting the police to put down society’s discontents, society should be changed instead.

L'articolo The Rise in Police Suicides from France to the US proviene da InsideOver.

Police figures from England show a 73% rise over five years in women and girls being charged with “possession offences” as a result of carrying knives.

These figures fit in with an overall rise in knife crime throughout the UK that sees knife and offensive weapon offences in England and Wales up 8% on last year. The overall numbers – 22,041 offences recorded between March 2018/19 – are the highest that they have been in almost a decade. Possession offences include illegal possession and threatening with a blade, but not murders or assaults that involve knives.

While knife crime in the UK is typically male-dominated, the escalation in female knife offences is still a country-wide concern. Recorded offences are up 52% in London, 54% in Merseyside, 82% in South Yorkshire and twice as many incidents recorded in Greater Manchester between 2014 and 2018. There are also concerns about the young age of female offenders in the police figures. Almost a quarter of female offenders were found to be under 18, with the youngest female offender only seven years old.

Speaking on Radio 4’s Today Programme, MP and chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Knife Crime, Sarah Jones, said:

“What we suspect is that it is much the same as sexual exploitation, that girls are groomed into gangs through praise, through friendship, through offers of protection, through asking people to run errands.

“The same kind of patterns you see girls being pulled into sexual exploitation apply to criminal networks. They end up carrying knives and getting involved in crime.”

Additionally, she said, gangs often believe young girls to be useful for criminal operations as they are less likely to be seen as suspicious and stopped by police. A 2019 report from The Children’s Society found that children under ten – the age of criminal responsibility in Britain – may be of particular interest to gangs ferrying drugs from cities to rural customers. These operations, known as “county lines”, are thought to generate £1.8 billion annual profit in the UK and rely on dealers in city centres using young and vulnerable people to transport drugs to the countryside. The National Crime Agency reported a 40% rise in county line operations in the past year, reflecting the national rise in knife crime offences.

Austerity cuts in policing, mental health care and youth services have been widely credited with the overall rise in knife crime figures among men and women. Other reasons for the increase in female offenders are complex. “There are a number of interrelated factors at play,” a spokesperson from St Giles Trust, a charity supporting ex-offenders, told The Guardian. “These include cuts to vital support services, domestic abuse, the role of the drugs trade and the exploitation of vulnerable people that goes with it, school exclusions and the need for many young people – young women in particular – to feel a sense of belonging.”

The UK government, now under Boris Johnson’s leadership, has pledged to tackle knife crime by increasing police powers. Stop and search powers have been expanded, granting police officers the right to search anyone, even without “reasonable suspicion” that they intend to cause violence. But critics have argued that this will do little to address the root causes of knife crime, and may even worsen relations between police officers and the communities they serve.

“This will not only consume police time and erode trust in the police, but have little impact in actually preventing people carrying knives. What we really need is more community police officers to build trust, turn young people away from crime, and target stop and searches on those who do carry knives,” said Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesperson, Ed Davey.

Meanwhile, St Giles Trust says solutions for female knife crime lie outside the criminal justice system. “Support needs to be put in place to help identify vulnerable young women who are at risk and give them the help they need to access positive opportunities, build their self-esteem, recognise healthy relationships and build their resilience.”

L'articolo The Rise in Women and Girls Carrying Knives in England proviene da InsideOver.