Slade, Gavin

English

Policy Documentation Center

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Georgian Foundation of Strategic and International Studies 
Georgia’s Poisoned Soil – Will Zero Tolerance Policing Work? 
Gavin Slade 
 
Introduction: Zero Tolerance 
 
In his annual address the Georgian President, Mikheil Saakashvili, put forward a 
policy of zero tolerance. ‘I am announcing a new draft law with zero tolerance for 
petty crimes….There will be no probation sentences… Everyone who commits these 
crimes will go to prison.’ In order to accommodate a burgeoning prison population, 
and so as not to strain the already existing prisons, Saakashvili will have a new 3,000 
capacity facility built for these petty criminals. Other legislation gives the police the 
power to shoot a person caught committing a crime if they then resist or are 
threatening to the police. On Independence Day Saakashvili reiterated his faith in his 
policy. ‘We want…zero tolerance…towards petty crime. And this works. It is a fact 
that it works.’ In reality, whether or not zero tolerance works is highly contentious. 
 
Is the New Policy Backfiring? 
 
A shootout in downtown Tbilisi on May 2 brought the consequences of such a policy 
into sharp relief. Police opened fire on a car while giving chase to supposed bandits 
on their way to commit a robbery. They continued shooting even after the car had 
crashed into a tree. This was apparently in response to hostile return fire, though 
whether the bandits shot back or not has been disputed by eyewitnesses. The 
operation ended in the death of two of the bandits and put a third, a 20-year-old with a 
wife and two children, in hospital with grave injuries. 
 
On top of this, since Saakashvili’s address in February the law enforcement agencies, 
from a range of ministries but mainly from the Interior Ministry, have found 
themselves in the headlines more and more, accused of a wide spectrum of outrages. 
Current allegations include the kidnapping of a 17 year old girl in Gori, illegally 
confiscating cars in Batumi, handing out beatings, inciting the March prison riot, 
shooting each other by accident, and the now infamous murder of banker Sandro 
Girgvliani by high-ranking officials. Not to be outdone, the Finance Ministry’s police 
arm is also embroiled in a scandal concerning the smuggling of oil from Azerbaijan 
that may have led to the intimidation and death of a whistleblower. Meanwhile at the 
very same time the chief of the Finance Police, Zurab Arsoshvili, is accused of 
beating up a man who was being detained on suspicion of smuggling. 
 
The last case brings out what many see to be the inherent hypocrisy in adopting a zero 
tolerance policy on crime in Georgia: is it right to give extraordinary powers to a 
police force that continually proves itself to step beyond the law? While the police 
have been given huge powers to punish crimes at their own discretion, their own 
crimes seem to go unpunished. 
 
To ease these anxieties a Code of Ethics for the Police Service of Georgia has been 
drawn up. It will operate as a guide for police officers reminding them to act without 
discrimination, unnecessary force, or invasions of privacy. This ploy aimed at 
enhancing police reputation points to the fact that the zero tolerance policy is already 
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backfiring. How can the police operate respectfully towards suspected criminals when 
the president himself is talking about ‘cleaning our streets of this rubbish’? 
 
Fixing Broken Windows 
 
Zero tolerance is based on the so-called ‘Broken Windows’ theory developed in the 
1980s. Simply enough, it claims that leaving a broken window in a state of disrepair 
creates negligent social attitudes and disregard for the public domain that will 
inevitably lead to further and far worse damage. Concerning crime, the premise is 
induced from this analogy straightforwardly: unpunished minor offences lead to 
serious crimes. Here the emphasis is on law enforcement and crime prevention is 
achieved through deterrence. Zero tolerance policing comes with one shining 
reference: New York City in the 1990s. On the back of a zero tolerance crime-fighting 
stance between 1990 and 1998 there was a 70 percent reduction of murders and 
instances of violent offences dropped by 50 percent. 
 
Whether it was indeed the zero tolerance policy that was to thank for this success in 
New York is of course debatable. Crime rates are closely connected with socio-
economic conditions. ‘Root-cause’ theory claims that police simply do not matter in 
preventing crime; they exist as arbitrators once disputes have arisen or crimes 
committed. Stamp out social ills such as poverty, racism and injustice and crime 
lessens accordingly. Commentators on Georgia’s crime problem have noted how 
certain embedded, informal and illegal institutions comprise a constitutive part of 
Georgia’s sociological makeup. These include such phenomena as respect for 
‘thieves-in-law’ (influential criminal bosses) in areas such as dispute resolution, 
everyday disparagement of and disregard for formal law, and corruption as closely 
linked to Georgian cultural values. Thus it may be argued that to reduce crime in 
Georgia, better to research and understand the underlying causes of crime than give 
the police and judiciary extraordinary powers to exact justice once the crime has been 
committed. 
 
The Georgian government’s hard-line stance on crime, however, lays the emphasis on 
fixing the broken windows, that is, law enforcement as opposed to crime prevention. 
However, the latter is just as important as the former, if not more so. The state of law 
and order in a country should not be judged by the presence of police but by the 
absence of crime. However it is also wrong to suggest that the police do not matter 
and crime rates are affected only by the state of the economy, the availability of 
weapons, and the use of drugs, etc. These variables’ effect on crime rates is dependent 
on government strategy; that is, their effect is worked out within the context of 
policing methods. There is little evidence that deterrence by punishment on its own 
works, and in New York other strategies were adopted (see below) in tandem with 
this. What can be done to shift the stress away from fixing broken windows towards 
stopping the windows getting broken in the first place? 
 
Public Order vs. Public Service 
 
The zero tolerance strategy adopted by the New York police was not simply a matter 
or response-oriented policing, dealing with crimes as they happened. Instead zero 
tolerance also meant ‘problem-solving’. Crime is not arbitrary, just like other forms of 
human behaviour criminal acts are set in a historical time period, follow certain 
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patterns and are locked into different path dependencies and affected by formal and 
informal social institutions. To this extent crime is predictable - recurring problems 
can be identified. To make this problem-solving approach effective it should be 
combined with localized community policing. The information and knowledge base 
demanded of the police requires a close proximity to the public and thus depends on 
high levels of social capital, that is, trust in the police. To be successful the police 
must transform themselves from simple law enforcers or defenders of public order, 
into civil servants providing a public service. The major goal of such type of policing 
is to raise awareness and confidence amongst the public to remain vigilant and come 
forward with testimony in the case of crime – the idea is that the people police 
themselves. 
 
This approach runs into all sorts of problems when applied to Georgia however. 
Community policing is all well and good if genuine community already exists. The 
issue in Georgia is that a lack of civil society means a lack of grounds for 
implementing other police strategies other than hard-line, zero tolerance policies. In 
the UK areas that lack the social capital to implement community policing are termed 
‘poisoned soil’ or more officially ‘High Crime Districts.’ Before a problem-oriented 
approach can begin in such areas tough measures are used to break up criminal groups 
and establish the hegemony of the police over the area: police raids must be carried 
out, extra patrols employed, even curfews imposed. This goes hand-in-hand with an 
organised public relations campaign to increase understanding for these actions and 
trust towards the police. However, little distinguishes these techniques from a 
straightforward militarism associated with a police state. 
 
This may not be so important in a country with few High Crime Districts but in a 
country like Georgia, where poisoned soil is more the norm than the exception, this 
militarism becomes widespread and results in charges of authoritarianism against the 
government. These charges are getting louder in Georgia today. Opposition claims of 
government ‘death squads’ carrying out attacks on politicians start to sound more 
plausible to the public and, as fatalities in police operations and prison populations 
increase, these accusations can prove fatal for the government of a state like Georgia 
which suffers from such a severe crisis of legitimacy. In the last 16 years the only 
time the citizenry has chosen to engage fully with the state has been to overthrow it. 
Georgia is yet to have a democratic transfer of power and the use of zero tolerance 
policing without the necessary buttress of civil society to prop it up is likely to further 
disenchant an already disenfranchised people. The government is following a 
dangerous path that could rapidly overturn the gains of the Rose Revolution. 
Positive & Negative Social Capital 
 
Policing policy then should go together with policies to develop civil society. The 
police represent one of the most prominent interfaces at which state and society meet 
and penetrate each other. The problem faced by the Georgian state is that within 
society informal rules override the law as a means of organising social relations and 
interaction. A thief-in-law is more likely to develop a network of trust than a police 
officer. If the police are to ever play a public service role in Georgia then sufficient 
amounts of positive social capital must be built up. Social capital is defined here as 
trust, cooperative behaviour, and networks between groups. This can be both positive 
and negative though. For example, trust, cooperation and group networking are three 
things also possessed by organised crime groups. With an institutional vacuum 
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created during transition, social capital in countries such as Georgia exists in 
abundance—but in its negative form. ‘Black’ social networks - coordinated 
underground activities, black and grey markets, criminal brigades - are the type of 
communities that the police in Georgia have to infiltrate. Given the tight-knit fabric of 
Georgian society it is likely that the police, as people and maybe not in their official 
capacity, are already aware and are passively involved in this dimension of 
community in Georgia. The police then, are very much an indispensable resource in 
developing positive social capital and using it as a weapon against crime. Instead the 
current hard-line policy drives a wedge between police and people, state and society, 
and postpones any development of truly trusted police force that the public have 
confidence in and rely upon. The police, as they intersect both state and society, must 
not be alienated from the people they serve. 
 
If the police must be better used to practically establish the link between crime 
prevention and the growth of civil society, then the government must also pursue 
hegemony for the idea of the inviolability of and respect for the law, and the 
legitimacy of the monopoly of violence owned by the police. To this extent the 
current government policy is inherently counterproductive: in the absence of a robust 
civil society the police fail to engage the public in reducing crime, law enforcement 
then becomes the priority over crime prevention, and the police adopt a heavy-handed 
and response-oriented approach in an attempt to clean up poisoned soil. However, the 
use of force and militaristic strategies brings out and strengthens underlying collective 
doubts and questions over the legitimacy of the police and, by implication, the state. 
This questioning continues the support for informal imbedded institutions such as 
rent-seeking behaviour and dispute resolution by thieves-in-law. 
 
Moreover, imprisoning an ever greater percentage of the population is not going to 
help spend up the stock of negative social capital and change the prevailing attitudes 
to the police force. As Georgia’s own experience shows, where negative social capital 
appears this phenomenon possibly takes its most extreme form in prison networks. 
Resistance to the state was fomented in the GULAG of the Soviet Union and the man 
that entered prison as a petty criminal would leave a well-connected and recognized 
bandit - this process is ongoing in Georgia today. As Otar Gamkrelidze of the Institute 
of State and Law in Tbilisi said recently, ‘it is dangerous to send a young person to 
jail. He will leave as a professional criminal.’ 
 
The recent experience of Brazil shows that strong criminal unions that form in prisons 
can deliver serious blows to the running of a country. Interestingly, Brazil’s most 
powerful prison gang - the First Command of the Capital (PCC) - which was behind 
the recent turmoil in the country, formed after a jail massacre by police in 1991. This 
should serve as a warning, if any was needed, that heavy-handed tactics such as the 
use of Special Forces or the army against prisoners, still fresh in Georgian minds now, 
will eventually backfire in the future. Similarly, it points towards the self-defeating 
and dangerous nature of a rhetoric that encourages abuse of offenders, something 
Saakashvili needs to quickly realise. Evidence from other developing countries such 
as El Salvador suggests that a zero tolerance policy has simply swelled the prison 
population and this has in turn merely added to organised crime by helping to develop 
a wider net of connected criminals who stand in absolute opposition to the state. 
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Conclusion 
 
The current zero tolerance policy of the Georgian government is counterproductive 
and misdirected. It is likely to cause further resistance and obstacles to the creation of 
a law-governed society. ‘Getting tough on crime’ is good rhetoric for opinion polls 
but is unlikely to achieve major reductions in crime. Punishing petty criminals as a 
deterrent simply does not work without a strategy of problem-oriented, community-
based policing. This in turn however, is only possible where a robust civil society 
exists. It is, after all, the average man on the street that is relied upon to report crime. 
Such actions will only occur when vigilance against crime resonates in society. Such 
vigilance however implies a tacit acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the state’s 
law and its enforcement, and the illegitimacy of actions outside the law. Such 
legitimacy is not gained by locking up large numbers of the population for minor 
offences and being quick on the trigger. The government must think again about how 
it can help develop civil society whilst at the same time adopting such a policing 
policy that would allow the law enforcement agencies to engage in this development. 


Georgia\u2019s poisoned soil \u2013 will zero tolerance policing work?

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