Egypt's Policing Problem.

In recent weeks the people of Egypt have risen up against their President and his despised state of emergency law. Ironically the revolution that it took to achieve this has placed Egypt in something of a state of emergency with the institutions that make up civil society suffering from temporary paralysis and the army on the streets to keep the peace.

This last part is a particular problem because the one thing that has come out of pretty much every peacekeeping mission the UN have undertaken is that an army is no good at acting as a civilian police force. Whenever they are forced to do so one of two things normally happens. Either you get incidents like the Bloody Sunday Massacre in Northern Ireland or the army is forced to adapt so much that it loses its aggressive edge and becomes ineffective as a fighting force. The Egyptian military leadership know this and therefore want to get off the streets and out of the policing role as quickly as possible.

That is going to be difficult to achieve because while the post-revolution euphoria is helping to control crime at the moment this won't last for ever and the Egyptian public's hatred of the police means that if they try to fill the vacuum it will only make matters worse. Egypt though does have a couple of things that will work in it's favour.

The first is that it has a large, conscript army. As always with a conscript army this has created something of a two tier system with a central core of highly motivated, highly trained professional soldiers who are in the army because they want to be and because they're good at it. Surrounding them you have less well motivated, less well trained conscripts who didn't really want to be in the army in the first place and are just counting the days until they can go home. There is also the military police who are trained and experienced in preforming a policing role within the confines of a military structure.

The second positive is that Egypt has a large and complicated police force. Very broadly speaking it can be divided between the Municipal police who deal with day to day crime and the Central Security Force (CSF) who handle riot control, surveillance and generally crushing political dissent. Annoyingly the CSF also seem to handle all of the police's communications and logistics which makes it more difficult to separate the two. While it's not really my place to say I think it is the CSF who draw the real hatred from the Egyptian public while the Municipal police are tolerated in much the same way the police are tolerated in any western society.

So what I would do if I was trying to solve the problem is to withdraw the highly trained "shock troops" from the streets as quickly as possible. I would then get the military police to supervise conscript units to carry out soft posture neighbourhood patrols. That means they drive through the streets and answer emergency calls in soft-skinned vehicles wearing berets and side arms rather then in armoured vehicles wearing body armour and assault rifles. This will buy time so the Municipal police can be sorted through to find out who enjoyed attacking the protesters out of political ideology and who was just doing what they were told in order to get a paycheck. Once the majority of the "bad apples" have been rooted out the Municipal police can start to carry out joint patrols with the army units and assuming there aren't and major problems the army can gradually be withdrawn and the Municipal police can be left to do the job themselves. This process could take up to six months so if possible it might be worth forming special units made up of soldiers who are coming towards the end of their time in the army as not to impact on the structure of the military too much. This also has the added advantage that a few of these soldiers might find they actually enjoy policing and therefore want to join the new police force full time when they leave the army.

Of course this still leaves the much more complicated task of what to do with the CSF. While I think it's an absolute that they need to be disbanded and have some of their duties phased out completely and others transferred to either the Municipal police or a new federal style police force as long as they're kept off the streets I wouldn't be in huge rush to do disband them. Apart from being a really complicated task that would take years in a western society the CSF are actually considered some of the best trained and most capable police forces amongst repressive regimes. That means it would be a good thing for Egypt if as much of that talent and training could be held onto once the worst offenders have either been fired or put in prison. In the meantime as many members of the Municipal police and the conscript units need to be put through the CSF's public order training program so they are able to use the available tactics and equipment to peacefully, safely and democratically police protests and disorder in the short term.

Obviously I've never even been to Egypt so this is only meant to be a (very) rough guide which will be added too by people who have more knowledge and experience of the specific situation in Egypt.