WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Brownfield expressed said that he hoped the old police forces of Odessa, Kharkiv and Lviv would all be fully replaced by the end of 2015.
“There are now 2,000 brand-new patrol police in Kiev… supported by trainers from the California Highway Patrol and the Reno and Dayton city police forces,” Assistant Secretary for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs William Brownfield told a State Department briefing on Tuesday.
Brownfield explained the new units were designed to completely replace the long-established police forces of independent Ukraine in every major city of the country.
“[T]he new patrol police [is] designed to replace literally city by city the old DAI police of Ukraine,” Brownfield said. “We see that as conceivably the coolest success story in Ukraine over the last two years.”
Brownfield also said that after Kiev, the next three Ukrainian cities in line for training and replacement of their police are Odessa, and Lviv, “all of whom we hope to have completed by the end of this calendar year, 2015,” he added.
The Assistant Secretary noted that the US trainers were also imposing on the new Ukrainian police current US strategies for crime-fighting.
“[T]he thinking process — which, by the way, is not significantly different from how we do this here in the United States of America — is a three-stage policing process,” he told the briefing.
The first stage, Brownfield said, was community policing to identify those areas where criminal trafficking, or smuggling, was happening.
The second stage, he added, was using professional investigators to collect evidence and build target cases.
The third stage was to use on those that they eventually want to take down, and, finally, a “SWAT-qualified police organization or unit that is capable then of taking on, arresting, detaining and delivering for prosecution those individuals who are engaged in this,” Brownfield stated, referring to racketeering and organized crime.
