If you haven’t yet seen Varlamov’s post about the Georgian police, take a look. A lot has already been said and written on this subject, of course, but one more objective account (I don’t think there’s any reason not to trust Varlamov) can only help. Georgia’s experience in this area—and it used to look utterly bleak when it came to fighting corruption. Things there were a hundred times worse than here—deserves the closest possible study. A few years ago, when a journalist who had just returned from Georgia was the first to tell me about the major successes in rooting out bribery and plain old incompetence in the Interior Ministry, I laughed until I cried. I said I didn’t believe a word of it, and that the only way for Georgia to have honest police officers would be to import them from somewhere like Finland. And even then, within a month they’d turn into crooks, because Georgia was hopeless. We know those Georgians. We remember them from Soviet times. Crook upon crook, and another crook driving them on. But would you look at that.