27th anniversary of the PNH: the RNDDH demands better working conditions for police officers

12 June 2022 marked twenty-seven years of the Haitian National Police, and the network used the date to put three things in front of the public: the recurrent killing of officers, their general working conditions, and their inability to get medical care. The count runs from 17 June 2021 to 6 June 2022 and reaches at least forty-four officers murdered by armed individuals, twenty-one of them between 1 January and 6 June 2022 alone. The report then names them one by one with the circumstances of each death, beginning with an officer shot in Delmas 5 who died after being moved between two hospitals, and running through ambushes on the road, killings on motorcycles, a prison officer killed at Mirebalais by detainees attempting to escape, and an officer shot by another officer.

On the institution, the network records that remedial measures were being operationalised to restore the force's image, improve conditions and assist the families of murdered officers beyond the funeral, and that between the planning and the doing it is officers who bear the cost. It notes, without treating it in the document, that suicides are increasingly recorded in the ranks. Its recommendations to the state are for sufficient weapons, ammunition, bulletproof vests, motorcycles and vehicles; the cancellation of a decision taken in the Council of Ministers requiring the Ministry of Economy and Finance to approve any expenditure by the police directorate above fifty thousand gourdes; assistance to the families of murdered officers beyond the funeral; a rethink of police health cover and an operational Central Hospital of the National Police; an end to the supply of weapons and ammunition to the armed groups attacking officers and the population; and a review of the police files acted on arbitrarily between 2019 and 2021.