Police development: you're doing it wrong

I can't remember who tweeted a link to this excellent report on ANP development (speak up and be recognized!), but if you're interested in police development it is a must read. A product of the Peace Research Institute - Frankfort, the authors (Cornelius Friesendorf and Jorg Krempel) titled the work Militarized versus Civilian Policing: Problems of Reforming the Afghan National Police, looked at best practices in building a civilian police force and the German and US involvement in Afghanistan with the ANP.

The paper dives into a lot of the nitty-gritty of the ANP development program dating back to 2002 and it's worth a read. (I wish it had been translated when I wrote this paper that touched on some of these issues this past spring.) But I want to focus in on some of the conclusions and attempt to draw them into bigger thoughts beyond Afghanistan. They cite numerous issues of donors not effectively supporting the ANP development, recruiting problems, training problems, corruption problems, and so on and so forth. All important.

But what's important in this paper is that they look very closely at the intersection of police and military responsibilities and point how horribly wrong we've been delineating responsibilities between the ANA and ANP. Due to a number of factors - lack of a democratic policing tradition in the years running up to 2001, the use of military forces to train the nascent ANP, and operational needs - ISAF is building a paramilitary force not a police force. While the first of these factors can be overcome in my opinion (Kosovo provides a pretty example of making an adequate police force essentially from scratch), I think the latter two are catastrophic to police development programs if not done correctly. And we're not doing it correctly.

In brief, if a military force trains a police force, that police force is much more likely to look like a military force than a police force. Just as in Iraq, the ANP are formed into military structures (unless that's changed recently), they carry military-grade weapons (including RPGs on occasion), and they have little interest in the tedium of enforcing the law. Simply put, if you train your police with the military, you end up with police who can't police and are an under-trained and under-equipped military force. What you end up with is a force that exacerbates conflict instead of quelling it that primarily acts as a strong-arm of local factions or even national entities (such as in Iraq where the INP became the MoI's private Army). Historical studies have shown that military training of police forces nearly invariably result in this scenario and we need to stop doing it. Of course, that would require building capabilities and/or capacities in our civilian agencies such as ICITAP, OPDAT, USAID, or even INL. Something that seems unlikely given Congress's fetishization of military power over civilian power. Alas.

However, this pales in comparison to the operational necessities that drive police development away from policing and towards military operations. When conducting police development in countries embroiled in an intra-state war, priority is given to the operational needs to defeat the state's enemies, not to stemming crime. The U.S. and other donors have been building the ANP into a counterinsurgency force in their own right to "thicken the lines" as the old Iraq saw went. Community police simply wouldn't be able to defend themselves against any quasi-military insurgency. As they would be among the first targets of the insurgency, police being among the most visible realizations of a state's power, they would simply be slaughtered. This would then require precious military resources to be pulled from finding bad guys and instead guard the police. It's a lose-lose situation for any operational commander. So we've taken the middle path: forget policing and build a quasi-military police force. A force that, again, stinks at policing and stinks at military operations.

This is an offhand synopsis and analysis of the paper I linked to, but it distills to the fundamental flaws of our attempts to build a police force in Afghanistan. Because of the myriad problems underlying our efforts and our militarization of the ANP (because of the two factors discussed here), we're failing Afghanistan by not fielding an effective police force now and virtually ensuring that the ANP cannot transition into a true police force. Friesendorf and Krempel put it much more eloquently, but that's the basis of their conclusion. Nice, huh?

So what do we do about it? Our boys from Frankfurt call for reforms to the program and to ensure that those in ISAF who are assisting in driving the ANP strategy are police experts and not military officers (they don't say it, but an MP is not a policeman, so no, not even an MP should be doing this). Concur entirely. I don't know what else we can do for the ANP at this point. But the lesson we need to draw from Afghanistan and Iraq is that in conflict countries maybe we shouldn't do police development at all until violence reaches levels where they can operate as police and not as soldiers. Police development in the early stages of the war should focus on the ministries responsible and a cadre of officers who are provided with long and intensive training who don't actually do any policing until a violence threshold is met. At that point, DDR programs could help staff the police force around this framework of cadre who can then instill a proper police culture throughout the force and train their policemen to be policemen. Instead of throwing billions of dollars at sub-par police who also are sub-par counterinsurgents as well as conflict drivers, maybe we shouldn't do any of that until the environment is safe enough for an actual community police force to operate.

Unlikely, but maybe in the next war.

As if we needed more bad news about the ANP

How do you take a massive government project that is failing and ensure that it fails more and better in the future? You transition the contract between departments with little oversight or planning and then allow the contractor to fail to fully staff it. So says the IGs of the Departments of State and Defense on the perennially challenged Afghan National Police training program.

Let's start with the basics on this roughly $300 million per year program. It was started, as most police training programs are, by the Department of State's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL). This Assistant Secretariat is staffed by hardworking Americans that are Foreign Service Officers - not experts on policing generally speaking (there are of course, a number of these FSOs who have become so in their tenure at INL, but this is the exception in my experience here in DC and in the field). Between this lack of expertise and their organizational structure, they are incapable of in-sourcing police development programs. This has led to their becoming a contracting agency for DoS, which has brings us to these massive outsourcing contracts - primarily to DynCorps. Challenge number one is having a government agency with little expertise in a discipline overseeing a ~1000 person contract conducting that discipline. Without getting onto my training versus development soap box, in my mind this is one of the greatest reasons the ANP are still a failure throughout most of Afghanistan.

So it's not working and the powers that be decide that maybe DoD should take over the contracting responsibilities for training the ANP. DoD is a big organization that handles lots of ginormous contracts, so it should work. Right? Wrong. Let's now talk about another organization that knows next to nothing about policing. I've written before about the large differences between the police and the military - the fact that they're both in uniforms and armed does not mean that they are interchangeable. If you doubt this, just take a look at Iraq's police or read this excellent paper by the brilliant Bill Rosenau. From a performance monitoring perspective, this transition will likely not change the outlook for ANP training in the coming years from its DoS days.

Now that we've argued that two departments who have owned this contract don't really know what they're doing, let's take a quick look at the IG report (quick because the bean counting stuff puts me to sleep).

• Finding A: DoD and DoS did not sufficiently plan for the transition. A billion dollars over three years for the program that more than one senior official has billed as our exit strategy. How does this happen? This is how you take a bad program and make it worse. Read the rest of this section - this is almost criminal.
• Finding B: Additional personnel needed for program management and contract oversight. We're looking at oversight organizations that don't know much about the topic they're contracting and then they're not even staffing them to do the basic oversight work such as processing paperwork.

Successful police development is one of the major keys to our withdrawal from Afghanistan. And yet we're still doing train and equip programs through contractors who are understaffed and receive oversight from government organizations who don't very well understand what they're supposed to do. Now we see that a significant event in all of this that was designed to improve how things were being done was absolutely fumbled and still not corrected as of this week. It is apparent that the U.S. is still not serious about the Afghan National Police as a viable force to assume responsibilities after we transition responsibility. So let's get this right very quickly or think about not wasting any more money on this endeavor.

Military leadership =/= Police leadership: advice to the Winsor review

I wasn't aware until this morning that UK is undergoing the largest review of its police forces in 30 years. This review (officially titled the "Independent Review of Police Officers' & Staff Remuneration & Conditions") is headed by Tom Winsor, a former rail regulator and current lawyer. The committee has published the first half of their report already and the second half should be out in about six months. While I've spent some time researching and writing about policing, it has been almost exclusively on deploying police not domestic policing. However, there are some principles of policing that are universal and that it looks like the second half of the report might challenge some of the principles.

The Telegraph has an article today that the Winsor review is considering recommending allowing soldiers, lawyers and foreign police chiefs to enter the force without the mandatory two-year probationary period, most of which to be served as a constable (yes, I know, it's the Telegraph, which I loathe to quote as a sole source for anything). I have absolutely no opinion on the last bit - that might be good for the police force for a number of reasons. I have serious issues with the first recommendation and will withhold comment on the lawyers bit (a more complicated topic).

Firstly, I don't have issues with former soldiers (Marines, airmen, sailors, etc) and lawyers serving in a police force. I think that's great. But I do have issue with the idea that you can take a military leader and assume that his leadership qualities are a great fit for police leadership without indoctrination into the police force and its culture. If there's one thing we've learned from police development programs in Iraq and Afghanistan is that if you have the military lead training and reform of police forces, you end up with police forces that look a lot more like military forces than police forces. It mainly has to do with the difference in leadership: military have a command relationship with their soldiers, while police have a managerial relationship with their subordinates. After all, police officers are all officers. (I have a whole slide presentation I put together for a talk on this subject if any of you are interested.)

That's why some probationary period is required to transition leaders, in my opinion. You can't just have a class on rule of law vs. good order and discipline and expect soldiers to be good cops. Like a lot of professions, police culture is the source of a lot of their strengths (also often the source of bad policing traits) and it can't be learned in an 8-week school or some such thing. At an extreme example, could you imagine if Air Chief Marshal Jock Stirrup, Baron Stirrup, was made the head of the Met tomorrow? I don't think anyone (save those that support a strong police state) would think that a good idea. The bottom of the Telegraph article has a couple of quotes that are pertinent to this and should be heeded.

The bottom line here is that soldiers and police work in disciplined, uniformed, hierarchical organizations, but that does not mean they are the same thing. I highly recommend to the Winsor committee to not recommend removal of the probationary period and time as a constable. Different promotion policies after that, sure, but soldiers need to learn how to be police before they can be able to lead police.

Police development: more bang for your buck

This morning, Andrew Exum highlighted a throwaway piece in the Washington Post on the police in Egypt. Like many unstable and/or despotic states, the police forces are among the greatest threats to the citizens of those countries. Whereas in most Western countries the police exist to protect the people, in most of the rest of the world the police exist to protect the state from the people. As you can imagine, governments love and people hate this setup. In cases like Egypt, changing the police forces to protect the people can go a long a way to improving the stability of the country - especially after they've tried and failed to suppress the population.

Change of this nature requires significant work on not just the training of police, but cultural adaptation and development. Evolving the mindset of established forces can take a long time, if it's not a generational effort. Sacking the police and starting over usually fails as well. Just like disbanding militaries, firing armed and trained policemen introduces a destabilizing force onto the streets; a force that had had better luck with the previous regime (see Iraq). It also presents the difficulty of vetting new police, often in countries with low literacy (see Afghanistan). Mere training programs from the U.S. also do not even begin to address the problem - often the police are already moderately trained. While improving their skills and capabilities are necessary, developing them as professional police requires a change in mindset and should be the focus of U.S. police assistance. The entirety of the literature on this topic supports this, even if development doesn't always do the trick (obviously, the host nation needs to really want to change its ways).

Ex is right in the gist of his post - if we're invited to help these newly-democratizing nations, we should start with the police. I diverge from his position in that we shouldn't start a training program, we should initiate a police development program (again, if invited to do so). Funding-wise, a small team of police development experts that help the Egyptians revamp their police structure, policies, and police academy curriculum would provide dividends much greater than the investment. This should be our focus in the region, not military aid, which is expensive for the USG and provides little return in stability or U.S. national objectives.

For those of you not in the small circle of people and organizations that work on police development issues, the USG's primary organization for doing this is the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP). (Disclosure: With my previous company I did some work with ICITAP, but they were never a client.) This is a fantastic program within the Department of Justice that I was very impressed with, both here in Washington and in the field. And they really get it, which is why I'm giving them this free advertisement. They also come in a quite cost effective as they have relatively small staff and are funded by other USG agencies when implementing programs abroad. The challenges to getting them out into the field, though, is that they have a relatively small staff and are funded by other USG agencies when implementing programs abroad. In spite of their good work in many places (see Kosovo, Iraq, Panama, and a host of others), they aren't always the first agency used for U.S. police programs. Often, train and equip contracts are used first - sometimes succeeding, but often not and then require ICITAP expertise to sort things out. Another challenge for ICITAP is that police development often takes 10 or more years if done correctly, which is often beyond the political and budgetary horizons of the U.S., so the U.S. often chooses haste over right. We need to stop doing that.

The point of all of this is to say that police development is what the U.S. should focus their efforts on if we're asked to asked to help out in these countries. And we're asked to do so, the USG should support ICITAP missions to conduct these development and reform operations (in conjunction with their their DoJ OPDAT brethren and DoS INL training programs). In these days of governmental austerity, it is a cost effective way to meet USG objectives and the needs of the local governments and people.

Longer-term engagement in Haiti: Beware the Insta-Pundits

Revealing just how much our foreign policy discourse has changed over the last decade, the discussion of humanitarian relief for Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake has quickly turned to considering what if any form longer-term US engagement should take. This is a good thing, but a serious danger lurks as the denizens of security think tanks and policy shops try to quickly develop some expertise on a situation they have, for the most part, ignored. Although there are a handful of Haiti-hands scattered through-out the administration and the foreign-policy firmament, I worry that too many will succumb to the urge to fill in the gaps in their knowledge with what passes for 'received wisdom.'

What do I mean? Check out this briefing from the Center for Defense Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Not my favorite institution at the best of times, but to get this much wrong in only two and half pages is, well, remarkable. Aristide was removed in 2004, not 2006. Comparing Haiti today to Somalia in 1993 is absurd - I don't think I even have to explain why. And in claiming that the UN peacekeeping mission (aka MINUSTAH) has "been struggling to counter the activities of gangs and other armed groups—the primary power‐brokers in the embattled nation," AEI manages to simultaneously be several years out of date on the security situation, and unfairly dismissive of the UN's successes. I'm picking on AEI because Small Wars Journal linked to the article, but I suspect there are other examples out there.

Between 2005 and 2007, MINUSTAH broke the back of the gangs through intelligence-led joint military-police operations. Following a 'clear-hold-build' pattern, they expanded security bubbles into previously gang-controlled neighborhoods by targeting gang leaders for arrest, stepping up patrols, establishing new police stations and checkpoints, and introducing employment and essential services projects on the heels of security operations. While progress has been slow, the mission has also made important headway on reforming the Haitian National Police. This is not to gloss over the serious problems that persist (and there are plenty), but Haiti in 2010 is not Haiti in 2004, or 1994 for that matter.

Point is, if we want to help prevent Haiti from backsliding, we have to recognize what has changed over the last 6 years. MINUSTAH has had a hard time responding to the earthquake because it has effectively been decapitated by the collapse of its HQ and the death of a significant chunk of its senior staff. It's apparently hamstrung response is not reflective of its role over the last few years, or its potential going forward. Likewise, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Canada and CARICOM have all been seriously engaged in Haiti, and should be viewed as partners for the development of a regional strategy. While greater US engagement could be critical for re-energizing international efforts, in most cases it would be counter-productive to shoulder them aside.

Bottom line: beware the proliferation of insta-pundits peddling stale-dated information, anecdotes rather than careful assessments, and received wisdom that sounds a little too familiar. We get more than enough of all that on Afghanistan.

Ink Spots reader kicks ass, takes names

Just kidding, not really. But Mike Few is quoted here about a program he's involved in out in Salinas, California, to help stem gang violence.

Not gonna lie: I'm a little uncomfortable with the application of military concepts to domestic policing, however simple it is for us to see the overlaps.

Policing and counterinsurgency

I'm reading a really interesting book right now called Cop in the Hood, by Peter Moskos. The author is a Harvard-trained sociologist who spent a year as a cop in Baltimore's Eastern District. I've never been terribly interested in the subject of urban policing, but I am a huge fan of The Wire (and, as we've seen in the past, of pretty much anything that relates to counterinsurgency theory).

Now I should go ahead and put out the disclaimer -- drilled into me by SNLII, who wrote pretty extensively on this subject on the old Abu Muqawama (and this is a good thread on that) -- that there is a huge difference between policing and COIN, and a huge difference between police and soldiers. Their methods are different, their operating environments are different, their desired endstates are different, their legal authorities are different, and so on and so on. We don't want to live in a world where we think of our police as counterinsurgents (though imagining our counterinsurgents as police is a bit more desirable, at least when we're a little further along the spectrum of conflict and into Phase 4 and 5 scenarios).

Having said that, there are some undeniable parallels when it comes to things like patrolling, presence, and the necessity for dependable, timely information/intelligence. This passage from Moskos stood out for me.

One officer complained: "Nobody here will talk to police. Half the public hates us. The other half is scared to talk to us. I would be, too. But we can't do anything without the public. They know who's dirty and who's not. They know who's shooting who. We don't know. They live here. We just drive around in big billboards..." [emphasis mine]

This is obviously the same rationale behind combat outposts (COPs) and joint security stations (JSS) in counterinsurgency: presence among the populace, access to current intelligence directly from the source, and the credible promise of protection from retaliation by those who would prefer silence.

I think there's also an interesting parallel to be drawn between the attitudes of the run-of-the-mill, generally somewhat moralistic and socially conservative police officer fighting the drug war (to the extent that we can generalize, and Moskos does) and the perhaps reluctant counterinsurgent, the specialist or lance corporal who signed up to drive tanks and shoot bad guys and instead ends up sharing a tent with a foreigner who doesn't shower very much, or building a school, or vaccinating goats. The way that the organization helps its personnel to understand the broader context of the mission, and tries to avoid stigmatizing mission-essential tasks that are often derided by the rank and file, is vitally important to relating mission performance to objective effectiveness. (Here's a great example of a senior leader trying to do exactly that, emphasizing the change in mindset that is necessary to institutionalizing security force assistance as a core mission of the U.S. Army.) A big reason that modern policing seems not to negatively impact crime rates to the extent that it could or should is a complete lack of buy-in on the part of patrol officers when it comes to concepts like community policing, foot patrol, reconciliation, or (even more out there) legalization/decriminalization of drug use.

NOTE: Don't get into drug politics here, because I'm not interested. Or crazy race-baiting. Please and thanks.