The Interior Ministry under scrutiny

Two tragedies have made the Romanian Interior Minister Lucian Bode criticize the police system, which, according to him, has deteriorated steadily over the past 30 years.

Leyla Cheamil, 18.01.2022, 13:50

A tragedy that could have been avoided has caused a series of vehement reactions in Romania. A 13-year-old girl died last week after being fatally hit on a pedestrian crossing in Bucharest by a police car and a second girl, seriously injured, was taken to hospital. The police car had its lights on. The interior minister, Lucian Bode, also reacted to the tragedy and explained that the policeman who was driving the car was not on an emergency mission, but was simply doing his job, at the request of the Directorate for Persons Record. He also said that the police officers who drive a police car, whether they are on an emergency mission or not, are not exempt from criminal liability.

Lucian Bode: “The law is very clear: everything that means driving in a priority situation, whether the police officer is on a police mission or on an emergency mission, the driver of a police car has the obligation to drive carefully and is exempt only from civil offense liability, not from criminal liability.”

The policeman who caused the tragedy in Bucharest was employed from external sources, which means that he did not attend a police school. The interior minister, Lucian Bode, announced that, following the tragedy in the capital, the process of recruiting police officers from an external source will be reanalyzed, a process which, although necessary, proves to be risky in some situations. Actually, several people have been lately hired from external sources due to the staffing crisis caused by retirement and the small number of places in police schools.

Another tragedy has prompted the interior minister to point the finger to the ‘rot of a system that has deteriorated constantly over the last 30 years’. ‘Insufficient human resources have sometimes proved to be poorly prepared, sometimes to be in collusion with the local political power and sometimes in collusion with local criminals Lucian Bode concluded.

This time, the tragedy took place on January 9 in Bolintin Vale (south), where hundreds of people took to the streets to complain about the lack of involvement of the authorities, in the context in which a family terrorizes them and a member of that family killed a man by hitting him in the head with a stone. The locals from Bolintin Vale called for urgent measures to protect them from the Roma community that came from another locality and that are causing scandals. The city was declared a special area of public safety, and dozens of gendarmes and police were then mobilized there.

These tragedies led the opposition Save Romania Party – USR to demand, once again, the resignation of the interior minister, who, they claim, has failed in his mission to reform the police system. USR considers that the interior minister position should be held by a man who is able to come up with clear and firm solutions, that should restore the prestige of the police uniform and the trust of Romanians in the state institutions that must protect them. (LS)