Liberia Police Dogged by Graft Despite Decade of Reforms

Monrovia: In the shade of palms lining Monrovia's Waterside Market, street vendors vie for customers, yelling to passers-by about their latest bargains while keeping an eye out for the ever-present menace of the police.

Sitting behind her jewellery stall, 29-year-old student Zoe Freeman smiles nervously as she explains how officers in Liberia's capital regularly confiscate her merchandise and extort money from her.

"Sometimes they charge you $10, another time you pay $20 or 500 Liberian dollars ($5.80/4.2 euros). The prices vary with different officers," she tells AFP.

"Sometimes they confiscate your goods and take them to their headquarters and by the time you get there, they've stolen nearly everything."

In the punishing tropical heat of a Liberian spring, the air thick with the aroma of seasonings, smoked fish and ripe mangoes, traders across the market tell the same story.

Abel Dayougar, 26, quit a life spent in and out of jail for armed robbery to become a used-clothes trader, but says police harassment is making him question whether turning over a new leaf was the right decision.

"That's what brought me into the market -- to make an honest living... I am begging the president (Ellen Johnson Sirleaf) to talk to her police to leave us alone," he said.

In Mechlin Street, a steep hill leading down to Waterside lined with Fulani tailor shops, Indian garment boutiques and Lebanese homeware stores selling cheap kitchen utensils imported from China, traders complain of police brutality.

Louis Gray, 33, said he was beaten up after resisting a police officer attempting to take the clothes he was selling.

- Police 'most corrupt' -

This is the reality of doing business on the streets of Africa's oldest republic, which was devastated by 14 years of back-to-back civil wars.

More than 200,000 people were killed in the 1989-2003 conflicts and thousands more fled the fighting, which left the economy in tatters and the country overrun with weapons.

Ten years on, Liberia is one of the world's most corrupt nations and the police force is seen as the institution most on the take, according to Transparency International's 2013 Global Corruption Barometer.

The graft survey found 77 percent of Liberians asked, had paid a bribe to law enforcement officers in the past year.

And Human Rights Watch documented cases of police demanding money from people to investigate alleged crimes and extorting goods from street vendors, in a report issued last year.

The 58-year-old Liberia National Police (LNP) was effectively started from scratch again by the United Nations peacekeeping mission UNMIL after the war.

With 4,864 officers for some 4.3 million people, the force represents about a quarter of the number in Scotland, which has a comparable population.

The chronic weaknesses in the force have become an urgent issue with a drawdown of United Nations troops from a peak of 15,000 in the post-war west African nation to just 3,750 by next summer, leaving the police in sole charge of security.

Basic police training is severely behind schedule owing to funding shortfalls, the UN says, with a reported backlog of over 1,000 recruits waiting to be shown the ropes.

The salary for a police constable in Liberia is just $150 a month and morale is further dented by the deplorable condition of stations across the country, lacking the most basic of facilities.

- No handcuffs, no uniforms -

AFP visited two police posts in Monrovia where officers complained of intermittent electricity and no water supply, vehicles, computers, telecommunications, uniforms, or even handcuffs.

In each case the dilapidated, musty buildings looked like they would barely withstand a heavy rainstorm, let alone a serious breakout attempt.

"What makes the job most difficult is a lack of logistics across the board. The men are willing to work, the men are there, but the logistics are not," Chief Superintendent Prince Gittens of Paynesville police station tells AFP.

Amara Kamar, the shift supervisor at Bongotown station, said he had 45 policemen, about half the number required to do an adequate job.

Karin Landgren, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General in Liberia, told reporters in April she had visited police stations across the country and seen the same grim picture.

Liberia's police chief Chris Massaquoi says the force is on top of recruitment and expects to have 8,000 officers by 2017. He maintains that poverty and the corruption it breeds are not exclusively a police problem.

"This is a country that was torn apart during 14 years of civil war. All of the infrastructures, all of the institutions, were broken down... and there are competing priorities," he told AFP.

Corruption, he said, was present in all sectors of Liberian society, urging the public to take responsibility for the problem.

"Let's take for instance the issue of bribes. How would an officer get bribed? By the citizens, by the motorists. And if they do not provide the bribe, if it is not offered, it would not be taken," he told AFP.

When AFP pointed out that police are accused of demanding and not just accepting money, Massaquoi replied that the force has appealed to the public to stop giving police cash, "even if they ask".

He said officers had been suspended or dismissed "on numerous occasions" where evidence of corruption was provided.

"Those days are gone where officers will go out and brutalise people and harass people. We're not going to encourage that," he said.

"And so for now the public knows very well that we are serious about being able to mete out justice in keeping with the rule of law and being able to protect everyone in this country."

Back at Waterside Market, however, the traders don't share his optimism.

"All of the police are the same," says Bendu Brown, a widow at 28 and a mother-of-three who tells AFP that officers have beaten her up.

"There's no jobs in the country. We are selling on the street so that we don't engage in prostitution, so that our brothers don't engage in armed robbery, but the police keep coming after us."