Applying Australia’s Experience to Russia’s Anti-Corruption Policies in the Police: An Event Structure Analysis of an Australian Corrupt Network

Abstract

Ivan M. Aymaliev — PhD Candidate, Junior Research Fellow, Laboratory for Sociological Analysis, Higher School of Economics. Address: room 510, 22, Myasnitskaya St., Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation. E-mail: iaymaliev@hse.ru

Leonid Y. Kosals — PhD, Professor, Senior Research Fellow, School of Sociology, Laboratory for Sociological Analysis, Laboratory for the Studies in Economic Sociology, Higher School of Economics. Address: room 530, 9/11 Myasnitskaya St., Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation. E-mail: lkosals@hse.ru

There is a commonly held belief that police corruption in Russia is rampant. While many scholars have proposed policies on how Russian police can modernize, extant research has been static or linear. Studying the history of the developed nation-states which have successfully tackled corruption and experienced similar social organizations of shadow practices is a better approach to designing an anti-corruption policy for Russia, rather than simply borrowing foreign practices with little reference to their socio-political development. Drawing upon the Australian experience of police corruption and reform in the 1950s, we suggest anti-corruption policies for the contemporary Russian police force. To do this, we apply an event structure analysis (ESA) to identify the key organizational and institutional factors which contributed to the formation and subsequent dissolution of the First Joke, a corrupt police network which operated in the Queensland Police Force from 1950s—1980s. We design our policy recommendations taking into consideration the particularities of the Russian police and our ESA of the First Joke. Our analysis suggests that curtailing cumbersome state regulations and the over-reliance on police performance evaluation, establishing democratic oversight, improving the current recruitment and selection system, developing community policing alongside further market liberalization and democratization could be effective policies for Russia.