Paedophilia scandal in the Romanian Police

A disgusting paedophilia scandal is these days shattering not only the Romanian Police, but the entire Interior Ministry, fuelling attacks in the political arena.

Bogdan Matei, 10.01.2018, 13:24

The plot is as simple as it is sordid. On January 5, cameras in the elevator of an apartment building in Bucharest recorded the sexual assault of a middle-aged man against two children, brother and sister, aged 5 and 9 respectively. The horrified children told their parents the entire story as soon as they got home, and the parents filed a complaint with the police. All television stations and websites aired images of the suspect, and on January 9 the attacker was identified and detained. The public outrage and repulsion were instantly augmented by general perplexity: the paedophile is a policeman. Aged 45, he has been a driver with the Road Police Brigade since 2010, and previously he had worked for the gendarme corps for 20 years. Himself a father of two, the policeman had been accused of sexual assault before, but the cases had been dropped for insufficient evidence.

In a first stage, the Social Democrat Interior Minister Carmen Dan ordered an immediate, all-encompassing assessment of all senior officers in the Romanian Police, and thorough psychological testing of the staff of public order services. She voiced her discontent with the way in which police chiefs handled the two cases involving sexual assault against children, in which the policeman had been previously involved.

Carmen Dan: “I feel that we are facing the same superficial approach and the same lack of responsibility on the part of the leaders of the Romanian Police. I haven’t seen, these days, any of the chiefs of the Police services to present explanations to the public with respect to this case.”

The Minister wondered how serious and strict the psychological testing of the Road Police agent had been, what his recent ratings were in terms of professional performance, and how it was possible for none of his superiors to have noticed his conduct since 1990, when he was employed in the police system. Carmen Dan took a firm stand: starting with the Police Chief Bogdan Despescu, all those senior police officers must go.

The Social Democratic leader Liviu Dragnea says, in his turn, that a thorough analysis is necessary with respect to the management of the Romanian Police, and that the way in which the agent’s psychological testing was conducted must also be looked into. On the other hand, the right-wing Opposition mentions that Mrs Dan has been at the helm of the Interior Ministry for a year now, and she should be the first to resign. As for the media, analysts believe that one of the senior officers that the Minister wants to sack, the head of the Murder Investigation Service with the Bucharest Police, Radu Gabris, is actually a persona non grata because he publicly criticised the criminal law changes that the Social Democratic Party plans to introduce.