28th anniversary of the police institution: the RNDDH denounces the working conditions of PNH officers

The report covers June 2022 to June 2023 in seven parts: the context officers worked in, the officers assassinated, the police posts attacked by armed groups, the operating conditions of those posts, the management of police personnel, and recommendations. The network describes a security situation that had been worrying before the de facto government took office and became explosive from 2022, marked by killings, robbery and rape including gang rape, with armed groups that are well structured, well established in their communities and confident of unconditional support from state authorities. Over the year officers were assassinated, driven from their homes and kidnapped for ransom, police posts were attacked and patrols and operations were ambushed.

The counts are fifty-eight officers assassinated between June 2022 and June 2023, twenty-nine of them from January to June 2023, and at least thirteen armed attacks on police posts, each recorded with its date and location and, where officers died, their names. On the institution itself, the network argues that the hierarchy as constituted risks doing the force enormous harm if it is left unchanged: it is public knowledge that members of it maintain links with armed groups and that the high command cannot give orders that officers will follow, so a hierarchy that has lost all credibility with its own agents cannot continue to steer the institution. It asks the authorities for better working conditions, for police premises built and refurbished to the needs the station commanders have already identified, for a revision of salaries and social benefits including health insurance, for the certification of officers by a body combining an independent structure, the Inspectorate General and the National Police Academy, for changes in the hierarchy, and for an end to the use of state resources for the benefit of armed groups while officers are destitute.