Research “Political Neutrality in Police System” reviews the state of political neutrality defense in police system. Presented research is the first effort to value police activity from exact angle and similar methodology.

Research is divided into three-parts and therein are discussed: 1) Personnel policy in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and related regulations 2) Police practice and detected problematic police instruments in specific cases 3) Critical analysis of public speeches by the authorities of Ministry (The part was prepared by “Institute of Social Studies and Analysis”).

Abovementioned issues are examined in context of political neutrality defense. Particularly, the possible facilitating factors of politicization are rated, as well as main detection forms of system politicization.

Major findings of the research represent that, despite of realized reforms in last years, in Police is not solid institutional fundament to secure political neutrality and substantially it depends on goodwill of the manager. Mostly, police politicization threat is related to following factors:

• System is sharply centralized and Minister’s authority as political figure is unbalanced;
• Personnel issues of regulation is vague and mainly is balanced by Minister’s order. Minister’s participation is irrationally wide in personnel policy;
• Separate Police instruments (for example, forced drug testing, administrative arrest and others) are as much failing and vague and encourages police to act willfully and simplifies use of police for political reasons;
• Internal and external control mechanisms of the system are weak, which increase the impunity problem.

It should be noted that in the process of the research while observing police activities there has been outlined few interesting tendencies:

• Within the research there was not detected generalized violent action problem directly from police towards opposition or their leaders and active members;
• While monitoring there was not marked use of rude force of police intervention and preventing facts towards organized activity;
• Although research showed abruptly repressive use of police force towards individual activists/public groups.
• Research although showed the police passivity and ineffectiveness towards violence of political and public groups. As usual, violence was detected from private citizen and in some cases it had organized impression.

Besides the issues that were discussed in the research, authors give generalized recommendations.

Research was prepared within the project “Protecting Political Neutrality in Police Activity”. The project was implemented by the support of Embassy of Netherlands, Program “Matra”.

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