While looking for comments on one of the Interior Ministry orders, I ended up on the main unofficial police website — police-russia.ru. When I saw a forum with the heart-rending title "Ugh, It Hurts", I naturally went to see what exactly was hurting them so much. One of the posts is shocking to the core. It’s basically the police answer to the famous line, "Babe, I killed a cop" (a reference to a well-known Russian internet meme/quote). I even took a screenshot just in case (the red underlining is mine):
As far as one can tell from the local media, this is roughly what happened: a local journalist got drunk out of his mind and threw a party at home. He was taken to the police. From there, he went straight to intensive care. In a coma. The sadistic cop has been charged, and the head of the drunk tank submitted his resignation. Tomsk journalists are demanding the resignation of the head of the regional police department. What amazes me about this forum post is this. The guy writing it (obviously a local cop) describes those calls for resignation like this: "Enough already... these prostitute journalists have launched a witch hunt against the police chief." What is going on inside these people’s heads? Did he even read the post he was replying to? "Raped with a mop for playing loud music". What else are people supposed to demand when they read news like that? That someone lose their quarterly bonus? Buy the latest issue of Esquire (unfortunately, it’s not online yet). They put together an interesting calendar: for every day of the year, one report of a crime committed by police officers. *Saturday, May 5 — in the Urals, a police officer was arrested for beheading a young man over 60 rubles (about US$2 at the time). Wednesday, August 26 — a police officer beat a detainee to death with a hammer. Tuesday, November 24 — drunk police officers killed a 20-year-old man over a line for the toilet. *And that’s every day of the year. Official cases only. And here’s another news item that really gets me: *In Kaliningrad, 40-year-old Igor Fateev, commander of a special forces unit of the Federal Drug Control Service, and seven of his subordinates were detained. Over the New Year holidays, they separately committed two crimes: armed robbery and kidnapping using weapons. *From here In the entire Kaliningrad region, the FSKN special forces unit had 15 men. Seven of them, led by their commander, turned out to be plain old bandits. Literally. I’ll say it again. IT CANNOT BE REFORMED.