#6377
#5
Newsday
July 29, 2002
In Russia, High Cost of Police Distrust
Death highlights preference to take law into one's hands
By Liam Pleven
MOSCOW CORRESPONDENT
Vidnoye, Russia -- When Andrei Zakrasin found his hoard of rubles missing from its hiding place in a low, brick garage not far from his apartment, he took drastic steps to solve the crime.
Training suspicion on two buddies he had been drinking with the night before, Zakrasin confronted one man, then the other. When both denied the theft, he closed them both in a pit full of near-freezing water beneath the garage and walked away, according to accounts by authorities and his attorney.
One thing the 43-year-old factory worker did not do, however, was ask police to help him recover his money, the equivalent of about $225. And that decision proved deadly for one of the men, Stanislav Maximov, who was fished out of the pit hours later, after people nearby heard cries coming from the garage.
"People are shocked. They're surprised that something like that could happen here," said Nikolai Ukhanov, a neighbor who knows Zakrasin, whom he described as a "great guy," and Maximov. "It's wild."
One thing that didn't appear to have startled either experts or those familiar with the incident was that Zakrasin chose not to turn to the very people charged with enforcing the law. Even as the Russian justice system adjusts to a new Western-style criminal code that took effect this month -- it will make jury trials widely available and give judges more independence -- the tragic episode provides stark evidence of the human cost of persistent distrust between police and the public.
"How can I explain to an American why?" said Maxim Golosov, Zakrasin's lawyer, as if no Russian would be surprised his client didn't make the short trip from his apartment to the police station, around the corner and down another street in this Moscow suburb. "If he had addressed the police ... it's very unlikely they would have accepted his appeal."
Indeed, millions of crimes are never even recorded in Russia, in part because police performance is measured by the proportion of cases solved, according to an independent study.
"There is a striking contradiction between the obligations and the interests of police," said the report by the nonprofit Center for Justice Assistance in Moscow.
In addition, according to the report, many Russians don't bother to seek help from police, who have a reputation for corruption and brutality. Nearly half the people who claimed they were crime victims in one government survey two years ago said they never even contacted police, the report said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has indicated that his government would like to improve the force, where the lowest-paid officers earn about $80 a month.
Last week a Moscow newspaper published a report that graphically illustrated the gulf separating police and citizens. Journalists at the paper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, staged a mock burglary, carting goods from an apartment and jumping from a ground-floor window. The journalists noted at least 15 witnesses, but none called police. When the journalists posed as officers and asked some of the same people if they had seen anything, none offered information.
"The public isn't ready to take the police as their protectors," said Boris Pustyntsev, chairman of Citizens Watch, a nongovernmental organization based in St. Petersburg. Pustyntsev traced the roots of the distrust to Soviet times, when the law enforcement agencies were mostly seen as the regime's tool for maintaining control, not simply public servants.
But in Vidnoye, a town of about 30,000 south of Moscow whose population swells when Muscovites repair to their summer dachas, police said residents do not hesitate to seek their help.
"Usually, people are quick to come to us," said Vitaly Fyodorov, the chief police investigator in the town, behind whose desk hangs a large painting of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the aide to Vladimir Lenin who established the precursor to the KGB.
On July 17, however, Zakrasin made a different decision by acting on his own, according to Yevgeny Gusev, the prosecutor handling his case. "He thought it was a more reliable way to get his money back," Gusev said.
According to his lawyer, Zakrasin, who is married with two children, immediately suspected his bottlemates, because he had told them about his money when they were drinking the day before. Once they were in the cellar, where the water was more than 3 feet deep, Zakrasin closed the door, opening it every 10 minutes or so to ask about his cash, said his lawyer, Golosov. Finally, Zakrasin braced the door shut with a stick and went to get something for his hangover, said Golosov, who added that his client may have had an adverse reaction to alcohol that affected his behavior.
A few hours later, one of the people lingering along the row of garages where residents store their cars heard cries for help, according to a witness, and when they opened the cellar door, one man was clinging to the edge. He was shivering and blue, and stammered, "What happened? What happened?"
But Maximov had drowned, according to the prosecutor. Zakrasin is facing charges of illegal detention and negligence leading to death, which could result in a sentence of up to 8 years.
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