#8 - RW 11-12-04 - RW Home
Moscow Times
November 11, 2004
Corruption Casts Shadow on Police Day
By Carl Schreck
Staff Writer

Two police officers got their comeuppance after they forgot to take care of a small detail in a plan to frame two men for a crime that never happened.

Exactly two weeks before police officers celebrated the Police Day holiday on Wednesday, the Moscow City Court upheld a lower court's decision to convict anti-organized crime officers Ivan Zhuravlyov and Vladimir Makhnyuk of abuse of power, falsifying evidence and perjury for wrongly accusing Georgy Kuznetsov and Andrei Bykov of robbery.

The arrests took place on Feb. 13, 2001, after Zhuravlyov got a tip that robbers were planning to hit a computer store at 19 Ulitsa Ostrovityanova in southwest Moscow, said Kuznetsov's lawyer, Boris Kozhemyakin.

Zhuravlyov decided to stake out the store and catch the robbers red-handed, taking a team of officers with him as well as a video cameraman to record the bust.

At around noon, Kuznetsov and Bykov, both ex-convicts, entered the store and started examining merchandise, Kozhemyakin said.

After a few minutes, Zhuravlyov and his team arrested the two, claiming they had hit the store manager over the head, knocking him unconscious, and ran up the stairs screaming, "Where is the money?" Kozhemyakin said.

Zhuravlyov and Makhnyuk charged the men with robbery, and the two spent the next three months in a detention cell in the Butyrka jail awaiting an investigation of the case.

When investigators from the southwest branch of the City Prosecutor's Office asked to see the video of the bust, Zhuravlyov informed them that nothing had been recorded on the tape due to technical difficulties, Kozhemyakin said.

The cameraman, however, was apparently unaware of Zhuravlyov's claim and sent over the tape, which only showed the two men browsing store shelves and then being arrested, Kozhemyakin said.

"They could have just sent in a blank tape and they would have been fine," he said. "Luckily they accidentally sent in the real one. Without that, no lawyer in the world could have gotten my client acquitted."

Kuznetsov and Bykov were immediately released, and prosecutors filed criminal charges against Zhuravlyov and Makhnyuk. Moscow's Cheryomushkinsky District Court convicted both officers in August, and gave them two-year suspended sentences. The Moscow City Court upheld the convictions Oct. 27.

Kozhemyakin said Kuznetsov is satisfied with the verdict. "He has done time, and he said he didn't want anybody else to go through what he went through, especially since Zhuravlyov and Makhnyuk have children," he said.

It was unclear why the false arrests had been made, although police officers have often been accused of trying to polish their records by padding their crime statistics.

Most Russians have a negative attitude toward the police, and many have witnessed or been victim to police corruption, according to a VTsIOM poll survey released ahead of Police Day.

The poll of 1,601 people in 100 cities and towns across the country found that 55 percent of the public has a negative opinion of the police, while 38 percent has a positive opinion. Six percent said it was difficult to judge.

In addition, 22 percent said they have seen police dealing with the public in a "rude and tactless" manner; 18 percent has witnessed police extortion; 17 percent has witnessed abuse of power; 16 percent has seen police use force; and 10 percent has witnessed attempts by police to falsify evidence. But 47 percent said they have never witnessed corruption, according to the survey, which had a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points and was released Monday.