OREANDA-NEWS.  Vladimir Putin took part in an expanded meeting of the Interior Ministry Board.

PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA VLADIMIR PUTIN: Friends,

The Interior Ministry has undergone a lot of change and modernisation over the recent years. A modern legal base has been established and human resources methods and approaches are changing too. The Ministry’s central organisation has been optimised, as have regional branches, and the level of technical resources has also increased substantially. 

Of course, it would be impossible to achieve truly radical change overnight in such a complex and multifunctional system as the Interior Ministry. A large number of internal problems had built up, as you all know. But the state authorities, and more important still, the public want to see improvement take place at even faster pace, want to see quality results that will make their effect felt on the country as a whole and on people at the individual level.

I am sure that the Ministry has the administrative, professional and human resource potential needed for achieving these important objectives. In this respect, I want to note once again the well-coordinated work that the Interior Ministry and Interior Ministry forces carried out during the Olympics and Paralympics in Sochi, and also during the World Student Games in Kazan.

Colleagues and friends, I want to thank everyone in the Interior Ministry and its forces who ensured security at these big events. I thank you for your professionalism, responsible approach, discipline, and your respectful attitude towards the guests, athletes, supporters, and the people of Sochi.

In many respects you not only ensured security but also created a positive atmosphere at these events. You gave a clear demonstration of what our law enforcement agencies can accomplish, including in terms of swift response and good coordination with other agencies and services and with the regional authorities.

I think it is important that we now take this positive experience and build on it, including in the big organisational task that is the establishment of branches of our law enforcement agencies in Crimea and Sevastopol, in accordance with our country’s laws.

The Minister and I were talking just now: the Ministry, jointly with the Presidential Executive Office, has prepared corresponding documents and draft presidential executive orders so that we can recognise military ranks, service records and diplomas for Interior Ministry staff members who used to work in Crimea and Sevastopol. This will allow us to formalise many of their documents so they can work. We must resolve all these issues as efficiently as possible with material and social provisions for Interior Ministry staff in Crimea and Sevastopol.

Colleagues, I would like to outline the priority challenges faced by the Interior Ministry in the near future and in the long-term.

The most important among them remains the protection of citizens’ legal interests and resolutely combatting crime. I will note that last year, we saw a continued trend in the decrease of registered crime numbers, including serious and particularly grave offenses.

This trend has continued in Russia over the last seven years, and it is certainly a good result. The number of registered property offences has decreased by 7% and the number of burglaries has dropped by over 10%.

At the same time, the overall number of crimes committed remains significant. So far, we have been unable to increase the crime detection rate. The share of unsolved crimes in Russia is nearly 44%; I want to draw your attention to this figure. It carries serious criminogenic risks, is detrimental to the department’s authority and, indeed, to the entire system of power; it leads to a lack of faith in justice, the power of the law and the inevitability of punishment for criminals.

We need to turn this situation around, first and foremost by increasing the quality of operative investigation and criminal procedure work, at all levels: from the neighbourhood branch to the central headquarters, and build more effective cooperation with other law enforcement agencies.

It is also imperative to react immediately to alarms and calls from people, identify and investigate them, without allowing delays, run-arounds, buck-passing and other types of heartless, bureaucratic attitudes toward this work, or even direct violations of the law and service standards. I am asking managers at all levels to monitor this very strictly and thoroughly.

An important area of your work involves decriminalising the economy and participating in the creation of a healthy business climate. I will note that compared to 2012, we have seen a nearly 20% drop (a little over 18%) in the number of economic crimes.