National Integrity Study – Czech Republic Authors: Petr Jansa, Radim Bureš & co., Transparency International Unedited English version of National Integrity Study. Final version in Czech language is downloadable on http://www.transparency.cz/studie-narodniintegrity/
POLICE (LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES) The police lack independence. As is the case with the public sector, such situation encourages loyalty to political representation and results in passive approach to investigation of politically sensitive cases. Thus our relatively high number of policemen and their reasonable salaries represent unused potential. Political representation keeps sending contradictory signals to the police (hiring new policemen or reducing their numbers), which leads to further destabilization of the police. The most recent budget cuts are seriously endangering proper functioning of the Police of the Czech Republic. The developments during the last few months have confirmed that political representatives see the police as an important source of power. Both the police and the Interior Ministry (to which the police are subordinated) are the subject of political competition even within the government coalition. Unless a political party has control over both these institutions, it strives to control some other law enforcement agency (General Inspection of Security Forces, Financial Analytical Unit of the Ministry of Finance). It seems that political representatives are unable to imagine that top police officers could be independent – they are convinced that “if someone is not ‘our man’, he must be dependent on some other political power”. Transparency of the police activities has significantly increased in recent years. Responsibility for unlawful conduct (especially of individual police officers) is ensured relatively well and it is implemented in practice. The situation may further improve when the new General Inspection of Security Forces is formed. On the other hand, a system of holding individual police departments and police forces in general accountable is not institutionalised in the everyday practice although the police have been committed to implementation of the project of quality management since 2001. While a general framework for integrity exists, in practice the issues of integrity of individual police officers are not given enough attention. One worrying factor is the high rate of leaks of information concerning criminal proceedings. Also, the police management does not pay enough attention to the cases of illegal use of police databases.