Aitchison, Andy. "Police and Persecution in the Bosnian Krajina: Democratisation, Deprofessionalisation and Militarisation". Criminal Justice Issues, Vol.14, No.5-6 (2016): 1-19.

Aitchison, Andy. "Police and Persecution in the Bosnian Krajina: Democratisation, Deprofessionalisation and Militarisation". Criminal Justice Issues, Vol.14, No.5-6 (2016): 1-19.

• Assumptions that police, because of their hierarchical organization and experience with violence, are 'ready' to commit ethnically targeted violence are misguided in multiple ways (2).
• Firstly, it assumes that police during wartime are the same people are peacetime police, something often not true when wartime police forces are deprofessionalized and filled with new officers (3).
• Secondly, the kinds of violence and circumstances under which violence can be used by police are vastly different from their expected responsibilities during ethnically-motivated wartime violence. It should not be assumed that police training in one kind of violence readies individuals for another kind of violence (3).
• The author defines the Bosnian Krajina region as the northwest region of Bosnia concentrated at the area surrounding the city of Banja Luka (2).
• "The police contribution to ethnic cleansing through the creation of an inhospitable environment for non-Serbs, forced transfers of population and murder ranges from omissions in normal policing tasks through to active participation in violence. This includes joint activities with paramilitaries, the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), and from May 1992, the Army of the Serb Republic (VRS). This section describes a number of interconnected police activities: disarmament programmes; the holding of non-Serbs in detention camps; interrogations; individual arrests; and cooperation in military operations resulting in deaths and the capture of large numbers of non-Serb civilians" (4).
• In many areas of Krajina, the police selectively disarmed non-Serb civilians, in contrast with a policy of general tolerance for the armament of Serb civilians and the organization of Serb paramilitaries. The range of weapons seized through this policy varied by municipality, with some police only seizing illegal weapons, whereas others seized all weapons from non-Serb inhabitants. This paved the way for an inequality of force enabling later genocide (5).
• The program of disarmament was initiated in 1990 by the Yugoslav Army after concerns of the armament of territorial defense forces were raised in the previous election. As order broke down, the targets became individuals rather than municipalities and the police became more heavily involved (5).
• The police, the Yugoslav army, and paramilitaries all cooperated in the operation of detention facilities, some of which were pre-existing prisons and some of which were modified civilian buildings. A mix of police and military officers usually ran these centers, with the personnel shifting to policemen as the war intensified (6-7).
• The improvised buildings used as prisons and detention centers lacked basic facilities for their inmates, who were subject to inhumane and unhygienic conditions of imprisonment. Beatings and ritual humiliation were common in all facilities, and sexual violence was used in Kotor Varoš (7).
• A number of inmates died, either from beatings or intentional violence, while staying in detention facilities. It is likely that police officers were involved in these killings (7).
• The police were involved, along with military intelligence officers and the intelligence-based State Security Service, in the interrogation of prisoners at both prisons and makeshift detention facilities (8).
• Even when the main instigators and organizers of violence were the military or paramilitaries, the police were involved in the arrest of suspects and their transportation to military facilities. The police were largely responsible for the actual arrest of Croats and Bosniaks in captured villages, even if the camp they were taken to were military-run (8-9).
• Police officers could either participate in the abuse and violence against non-Serb civilians during initial imprisonment and transportation, or protect civilians from that violence for a brief period. There are examples of both: some police beat and killed prisoners, whereas others feed them and protected them from angry villagers (9).
• The police were frequently involved in the perpetration of violence against non-Serbs outside of camps, with police units being both responsible for daily abuse and for perpetrating massacres on their own accord without requiring military or paramilitary units. These incidents were almost never investigated by superior officers (9-10).
• In the Yugoslav elections of November and December 1990, nationalist political parties received 75% of the vote and their support bases were largely split on the basis of ethnicity. The three ethnic-nationalist parties of Bosnia and Herzegovina: the Croatian Democratic Community, the Party for Democratic Action, and the Serb Democratic Party; agreed on little and tended to divide governance between their membership. The importance of party membership from the Communist era transferred the new parties, and police leadership was reorganized along ethnic-party lines (11).
• Political parties moved party loyalists, always members of their own ethnic group, into positions of power while disenfranchising other ethnic groups. This process did not have to be sudden, and officers have described it as a peaceful transition managed mainly through selective promotion and retirement of ethnic minority staff (11-12).
• The new police leadership often lacked professional qualifications, including many appointees without any experience in law enforcement, and depended on their loyalty to the party (11).
• The politicization of the police force undermined its professionalism. The appointment of inexperienced party loyalists in leadership positions reduced the enforcement of Yugoslav policing norms and made policing tied to political goals. The gaps created by the removal of ethnic minority officers were filled with former police dishonorably discharged, with entirely unskilled party loyalists accepted into police ranks by 1992 as the conflict intensified (12-13).
• Police officers during the Bosnian War were treated as potential combatants to be used to further war aims, an assertion backed up by the military training given to all Yugoslav police officers (13-14).
• As the Yugoslav army was forced to partially demobilize from areas of Bosnia and Croatia in 1992 under the terms of the Vance Plan, it began transferring large amounts of its equipment to the police, who were excluded from demobilization requirements. The police received armored vehicles, tanks, and a range of military weaponry (14).
• As the police became more heavily militarized through the transfer of military equipment, so the organization of the police also began to shift towards military structures focused on combat operations more than crime control. 'Special units' of police forces became the norm and most police were transferred to auxiliary combat responsibilities (14-16),
• "The ‘policeness’ of those who appear to be a part of the police organisation is called into question. The wholesale transfer of personnel and weaponry from military and paramilitary units into police organisations, along with the deliberate blurring of the boundaries between the police and the army, suggest a fundamental change to the nature of the police in the Krajina region, potentially marginalising a residual core of police whose training and service date back to before the war" (16).
• The involvement of police forces in ethnically-motivated violence during the Bosnian War was not a natural consequence of the Yugoslav police forces, but a deliberate result of political strategies which deprofessionalized the police force by replacing qualified officers with ideological loyalists and enabling unrestricted recruitment without the training that allows for professional values to be instilled (16-17).