Do you recall the late seventies film “Midnight Express” where an American is arrested, tried and sent to a Turkish prison for attempting to smuggle hashish out of the country? In it the Turkish police (or the customs, or the military police, or prison guards- it’s not exactly clear who they are in every scene) are portrayed as crude and brutish. When this film came out, the Turks were horrified at how they were characterized, and until sometime up to the late nineties, the film was banned here from cinemas and TV.
I watched this film again recently and the one thought that kept going through my mind was, “This is just not Turkish.” I’ve been here for a long time and I will give myself credit for knowing how the Turks act in certain situations, even if this film is set before my arrival here. In the scene just after the American tourist is busted at the airport, for example, the customs rifles through and violently tosses about the contents of the his luggage, all the while letting out amused grunts. Actually, real Turkish behavior would be something near the opposite: the customs police would carefully and methodically go through the suitcases without speaking a word. But that’s not very cinematic, is it?
In “Midnight Express,” we are not seeing Turkish behavior at all but rather a Hollywood idea, a cartoonish amalgam, of stupid, evil and corrupt police as they might be in Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Paraguay or wherever in the third world. If the film shows the Turkish police as cretinous hoodlums making sadism a sport, I suppose we should be thankful that during the strip search at the airport the director didn’t go overboard and show one of the police dropping his pants for a Sodomy rape scene.
Oh wait! That’s later in the film.
Actually, the director, Alan Parker, and the screenwriter, Oliver Stone, admitted later after much criticism by the Turks that they hadn’t bothered to do much research into Turkish society and especially not the prison system. Most telling of all in this regard is that they shot the film in Malta. But I suppose it doesn’t matter much if all your going to show is a dark, filthy 19th century prison interiors.
Now in 2011, more than 30 years after the release of the film, one might hope that people would have forgotten how Turks were depicted or that folks would have let other things make their minds up about Turkey. Yet, when I visit in Europe or the States, it’s very clear that this cinematic image persists. Now that I am a Turkish citizen and subject to being treated like a Turk if I am arrested, I get all sorts of comments that reference scenes in this movie, and it’s evident people still believe Turkey is like it is in the film. “Do they strip search you when you pass through customs?” they ask. (Actually, I'd rather pass through Turkish customs than American TSA.)
Unfortunately, this idea probably won’t change any time soon. Since the idea of the Turk as a sword wielding barbarian still persists in western Europe- it comes mainly from the complete panic in Europe caused by the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683- then this image of the Turkish police as presented in Midnight Express might have a long way to go.
I am here to dispel it as much as I can. Having taught English to police for the last couple of years, I have learned a little about them, and I want to say that these days this image couldn’t be farther from the truth.
In 2010, a student in one of my classes was a cop who worked homicide. He wanted to improve his English because he intended to take a test so he could work at Interpol. I found him brighter than the other 10 students in the class, who were all male university students studying engineering, and so I accepted his invitations to meet outside class. This involved going to his office at the police station, where there would always be 2 or 3 other policemen eager to practice their English, and converse usually about how Turkey compared to America. In these chat sessions, I asked a lot of questions about the Turkish police, and naturally they reciprocated my questions with those about the American police (“How many years of training do they have?” “Do they get good retirement pay?”) To my embarrassment, however, I found I really didn’t know much about the police in own my country. As I was going to California in June 2010 for a month’s holiday, I said I would be able to find out the answers then. I suppose I imagined I might strike up a conversation with an American cop just as I had been doing with the Turks, or wander into the police station and ask for some information.
High Noon
Yet, no sooner had I arrived at Los Angeles than I was reminded about how unfriendly and intimidating American police are. It happened at a Denny’s restaurant, our first stop out of LAX, where we had to wait 20 minutes to be seated. As we stood near the cashier, with a full view of the dining area, I watched the diners’ reactions as two LAPD patrolmen walked through the tables and booths to the restrooms, and then, a few minutes later from there back through the tables to the counter. When the cops started their trek to the toilet, I noticed that many people they were passing appeared to become self-conscious and suspended their conversations, so that the whole restaurant had quieted down by half in no time. (If there had been a honky tonk piano player, his hands would have frozen in the middle of his melody line.) Then, when they disappeared into the toilets, the hush lifted, and the sound volume returned to its full chatter level. This was not surprising in the least, but it was a new experience for me to see the cause and effect played out from my vantage point at the cashier. So it seemed right on cue that when they re-emerged from the restroom silence fell again: really, it was as though someone had hit the mute button on a remote.
In the restaurant I quickly realized that I wasn’t going to get my homework done for my Turkish friends, and I couldn’t believe that I had thought I would just saunter up to an American cop and ask some questions about police work. I would have better planned to crash a class at some primary school during careers day.
Careers Day at a Turkish elementary school.
During such a day at my school in Los Angeles in the fifth grade, “Officer Bob” from the LAPD gave us his presentation, but I only remember being disappointed. He had not brought along the one thing that could excite kids and that would have undoubtedly spawned two or three careers in law enforcement: he showed up without his revolver.
If you think I’m exaggerating about the unfriendly demeanor of American cops, I would ask you to tell me the last time you saw one of them smile.
When I was living in California I had plenty of dealings with the police for quite a range of different reasons: not just traffic violations and accidents, but for investigations into theft and burglary, and even twice for suspicious death (not as a suspect!). I do not recall one instance in those interactions where I felt the officer’s behavior could be called friendly. More often than not, dealing with them left me feeling upset or jittery for the day.
My own answer to the question- when did you last see a cop smile? – would be 1984, when I saw a highway patrolman break into a grin as he flirted with a counter girl at a Bob’s Big Boy. This is not just the last time, but the only time I’ve ever witnessed an American police officer really smile.
A smiling highway patrolman at the farmers market in San Luis Obispo, California, but it doesn’t count because its public relations work.
A Sweet Swat
If you travel outside the States, you will discover that there are other ways for cops to be. You will see that this off putting demeanor of the American cop is not at all necessary for a policeman to function in his job.
When I arrived in Turkey in 1990, I had just such a lesson. I had just begun teaching a class when I recognized one of my new students, Yusuf, in the city center. As I had thought he was a university student, I was surprised to see him dressed in a police uniform, and as I approached him, I realized he was directing a group of helmet-wearing, submachine gun-toting policemen out of a bus. When he turned toward me and recognized me, he broke into a huge grin and began waving excitedly. Leaving his men standing at attention, he came toward me with arms extended.
As we tried to enter an embrace, however, and each cocked our heads forward for cheek kissing, the submachine gun slung over his shoulder got wedged at a right angle between us, and I had to back off. He also stepped back and, after apologizing for poking me, unharnessed the MP5 from his shoulder and set it down on a nearby bus bench. He then extended his arms for a second time and we finally accomplished our full Turkish greeting.
I was feeling truly honored for all the effort he made to greet me, but at the same time I also felt uneasy about the unattended gun on the bus bench. My first thought was that it was a little risky to do such a thing. But then as I turned around I was reminded that the 15 swat team members standing 10 feet away were watching their captain’s every move and every move around their captain. I don’t think Yusuf really ever lost control of the situation.
You will have to admit Yusuf exhibited a nice-sized human dimension for a cop. His soft side is all the more extraordinary when you consider he is not only a member of the fiercest arm of the police, the swat team, but a commander of such a team. Leaving aside his unusual use of bus benches, he is a model for what I would like American police to be more like. It would be ridiculous of me to propose that they try to emulate his police behavior- after all, a lot of behavior is part of cultural identity - it's just that there are some things, like the friendliness and approachability, that they would do well to try on for size.
Guarding the perimeter of the American Embassy in Paris, these are four members of the gendarmerie, or French military police.
This is what I mean by friendly, smiling cops.
Maigret and the Case of the Naïve American
If I can anticipate your take on this event, let me point out that my being enamored with Yusuf’s style is not just a case of being easily impressed by foreign ways. When I lived in France, though I was quite taken with the culture, I found the members of the CRS, the national police assigned to preserve public order, to be just as unapproachable and unlikable and unsmiling as most American policeman. They’re generally huge guys for Frenchmen, seeming on average 6 feet-200 pounds in stature, so decked out in riot gear and toting sub-machine guns, they are pretty scary. They’re not the type of guys you tip your hat to.
Besides the periodic ID checks I submitted to in the Metro, I had only one contact with the CRS. When I had just arrived in Paris, I had stupidly entered a nightclub in the Pigalle section of Paris and had sort of let my self get set up to be separated from the rest of my money, if you get my meaning. I had to run out of the place while being chased by a gargantuan Algerian guy who was a ringer for the James Bond character “Jaws.” As I came hurling out of the front entrance, I nearly landed in the arms of one of the CRS, who patrol that area en mass. I suppose my ability to speak French was passable at this time, but I was so excited from having escaped from Jaws that my attempts to explain what had happened were entirely incomprehensible to the officer. He wasn’t offering any help, but in fact seemed threatened by my presence- I’m sure he pegged me as a drunken Dutch tourist- and just as I thought he might chase me off with his 3-foot nightstick, his colleague standing nearby, who had managed to get the gist of what I said, came over and intervened: “Go home, and count yourself lucky you’re not lying unconscious in the rubbish bin,” he admonished. When I tried to say something again to get them to go in and get my money back, or just arrest the people who robbed me, the first officer reiterated, “ That’s not our job. We don’t do that. We advise you just to go home and forget it.” Well, thank you!
(My French friends later confirmed my suspicion that CRS officers had been instructed not to mess with the sex mafia in Pigalle.)
The french CRS don't need sunglasses to look tough.
It’s hard to imagine anyone thinking good things about the CRS, and in fact the French people all seem to hate them, yelling “Nazis!” or “Gestapo!” at them whenever they show up at a public event. They contrast markedly with the Paris city police, who we all are familiar with through watching films set in Paris, like the Pink Panther series. (Actually, in Paris and environs the police are directed by a national department and are not really city police.)
Or, perhaps like me, you are familiar with the Paris police through reading Georges Simenon’s novels about lovable "Commissaire Maigret," the superintendent of the Paris “Brigade Criminelle.” The one thing you can say about Maigret and his colleagues is that they have a strong human element, both in how they relate to each other and to the people involved in their investigations. Maigret worked from seemingly infallible hunches about people, and would, just as his colleagues thought he was, as one said, "drowning" in a sea of contradictions offered by witnesses and suspects, see through the lies and come up with the culprit.
His atypical-for-a-policeman human side took many dimensions in all the 85 Maigret novels, but it is exemplified well when, as often happens in his adventures, he allows himself and his colleagues to pass by a bistro for a couple of pastis during the workday, or when, as his team work overtime at the "préfecture," he has the local brasserie bring up glasses of beer with sandwichs au jambon beurre.
What made the series so hugely popular was not the plots, as Simenon himself admitted, but, as he called it, the human dimension of the commissaire. Readers loved the fact that when, for example, Maigret interrogated a prostitute, he would get the relevant information out of her, not by being condescending and harsh, but by being non-judgmental and displaying gentleness and respect toward her, recognizing that her station in life may have been the result of unwanted circumstances.
One implication here, given the fact that people can relate to and admire a figure like Maigret so much in fiction, is that they are eager and waiting to do the same in real life. How have the cops missed the cue up to now?
The two times I had contact with the Paris police they showed a human side which was right out of the pages of a “Maigret.”
In my first month in Paris I got my introduction to them when I was drugged and robbed in my own apartment after inviting another student up to drink some wine. A few days after I had made a report at the police station, an officer and a translator came to my apartment for a visit. I had been feeling like an idiot for what I had let happen to me, and apparently their calling on me was to explain what exactly had occurred so that it might not happen again. (This was that the “student” was part of an Egyptian theft ring that preyed on new and lonely arrivals in Paris.)
The three of us were sitting at my dining table in the kitchen, where happened to stand an unopened bottle of Beaujolais. Maybe I noticed that they were looking at the bottle, but before we officially began I felt I should ask my guests if they would like a glass. Their being on duty, I really expected them to decline, as an American cop would, but the French being French, I felt I might be making too many assumptions.
These two are normal, non-CRS Paris policemen.
I clipped this photo from a woman's travel blog, from a piece titled "Why I love Paris."
My romantic ideas of the Paris police were not to be disappointed in the least. They consented without discussion to the uncorking of the bottle. We poured the last drop just as they got to their last point of Paris cautions, which was to never invite anybody to your apartment or living quarters until you had known them for at least 6 months!
Although I was still feeling like an idiot when they left, it was as one just emerging from a therapy session. In no time, I was ready to put the incident behind me and re-tackle life in a foreign country.
The positive impression left by this meeting was to be repeated in another dealing I had 5 years later.
Just before I left Paris to go to Turkey, I got slugged in the eye by a psycho in the train between Paris and Versailles, and at the conductor’s insistence I agreed to report it. The area around my eye had just been stitched up when I arrived dutifully by taxi at the "commissaire" with jurisdiction housed in a 19th century building somewhere on the outskirts of the city.
As I walked up the stairwell to the second floor office to give my "procès verbal," I was feeling pretty pissed at the entire French society for what had happened to me. I was angry and offended, not because a Frenchman had hit me, but because in the train no one had bothered to help me, nor even direct me to a hospital. Even if I hadn’t already planned to move to Turkey, I don’t think I would have stayed in France any longer than I had to.
I was immediately directed to an office with a lone plainclothesman sitting at a 1930ish wooden desk. In his grade school English, right off he offered me an espresso, then, all the while typing my report at about 80 words a minute with two fingers on a 1950ish portable typewriter- “You are very astonished by my speed, is it not?” – joked in a not half bad Peter Sellers / Inspector Clouseau impersonation that he would not rest until he found the man who assaulted me and sent him to face justice. In the 45 minutes spent there, he went out of his way to relax and humor this American. In fact, when I left, instead of feeling depressed and defeated, I was thinking up lesson plans for the next day’s teaching.
Click to Enlarge
Translation of the Statement:
The above named person makes the following statement to us:
Last Sunday I boarded the RER train, line C, at the Chaville Station. In the car in front of me was another passenger. I didn't pay much attention to him and began reading my newspaper. When we got to the Champs de Mars Station, this man got up and just before exiting the car punched me in the face, striking my left eye and breaking the lens of my glasses so that a piece cut me under the eye. Then the train left the station.
This man: 20-25 years old, thin, medium height, fair complexion, 3-day-old beard, short black hair. He's European, French, wearing a dark blue overcoat. He was reading a book on germs. His strange demeanor had attracted my attention during the trip as he had been making remarks to other passengers and on several occasions had been talking to himself.
I hereby file this complaint against this unknown assailant...(etc.).
Don’t think I have Maigret on the brain, but I could have sworn that when I was in the police station I saw through the door of the adjacent office two unmistakable, empty Stella Artois beer glasses on a tray, as though waiting to be picked up by a local brasserie.
You may want to argue that a police force that wants to put on a human face like my French friends is appropriate for the Europeans, but that America’s population lives by a distinct set of social values and requires a different kind of police demeanor, sort of like we have, unsmiling, unfriendly and intimidating.
“Balderdash,” as Commmissaire Maigret would say (in French, it’s “Baliverne”). If American cops acted friendlier with the general public- remember, we’re not talking about how they might behave toward suspected felons –they would put themselves at no more risk than some of their European counterparts, who seem to think that smiling does not compromise their function in the least.
Maigret, far right, played by Bruno Cremer, and his colleague Inspector Janvier are sizing up potential suspects in local bar in the episode "L'ecluse No. 1" (Lock No. 1) of a 2002 French-Swiss TV production called "Maigret."
They don't serve beer in this bar, so the wine- he ordered simply "blanc sec" - is not out of character.
When a Cop is Not
We have made some efforts in the direction of lightening up the police. In the early seventies in Berkeley, California, where I was a student, there probably was no other place on earth where policemen- of any sort, even the gentlemanly Highway Patrolmen - were more unpopular. There was at this time virtually a political correctness among the general population, not just students, to consider cops “an enemy of the people” and to address them as “the pigs.” With not much to lose, the Berkeley City Police initiated a program to improve their image in the community, whereby the fitter-looking officers 20-40 years old were taken out of the squad car and sent to patrol on bicycles and on foot. These cops were also “dressed down:” they were to wear shorts, open collars and carry no gun.
My comrades at the time have reminded me that they were also outfitted with pith helmets, at least for a couple of years. Probably the administration shelved the piths when they realized they were overstating their case, or perhaps, as they were in a student community that adored Groucho Marx, the cops had heard one too many refrains of “Hooray for Captain Spaulding!”
I think at the time I was skeptical of the police department’s motivation. Certainly I considered myself too smart to be taken in by their show, wherein I felt form and not substance had been changed. (I was a philosophy major.) In fact, after witnessing this new breed mix with the public for a while, I recall that though they looked cute in their short khakis, we thought they still interacted with a gunslinger’s demeanor.
Two of our finest from Charleton, Indiana. They are definitely in need of the sunglasses.
But one point at least goes to their side, for even if they didn’t succeed in re-doing their public image, they must have reduced the negativity quotient by a few degrees. I am convinced of this from the fact that when I visited Berkeley in 2008, I saw the same sort of bicycle riding officers patrolling around town. If they’ve been renewing this program for 40 years, they must feel there is some payoff.
I think in the last analysis the shorts did the trick (the form, not the substance!).
Of course, Berkeley was never alone in the effort to make their cops more lovable: the bicycle-shorts-no gun trick has been played all across America and Europe. I’ve never seen it in Turkey, but here- partly for Moslem, partly for macho image reasons - the cops would never consent to short pants.
As an alternative, like on the island where we live, where no one wants to put off the summer tourists, some Turkish cops have begun to patrol with the latest mode in dressing down: a police vest worn over civilian clothes. My friend in homicide advises me not to take them too casually, however, and points out that most certainly a Beretta or equivalent has been tucked in their belt over the right buttock.
You can’t fault the police for doing public relations- the police piss off a lot of people –but their efforts don’t speak to my real complaint about American policemen. I’m not interested in how policemen dress. Far from disapproving of the intimidating look, I’d say it’s necessary for most police work. Anyway, if I as a cop had to respond to a call of gang violence in the Oakland ghetto, I don’t think I would want to show up on a bicycle wearing shorts.
What I really want to propose has nothing to do with looks. What I wish for is a change of behavior: police training with a new guideline of how to act which accommodates some natural human reactions and lets the cop turn down his severe persona when appropriate, like when he is interacting with a regular, non-criminal person. Sort of learning to be like my Bursa swat team friend when he put down his gun on the bench to greet me, but not necessarily going quite that far.
Of course I’m wise enough to know that something of this sort would be a long time coming. Part of me knows that campaigning for friendly American policemen is as realistic as hoping one day for cheerful city bus drivers. Mine is just a wish, borne of a desire since my childhood to befriend a cop, like one does a fireman, but finding police totally unapproachable. It was inspired by my having been witness in the last decade to the complete makeover of the Turkish policeman, where a radical change of the degree I’m hoping for actually occurred and makes it seem that anything is possible in this realm.
Up until the latter nineties, the police here were feared and despised by the general population. This was rightfully so, in the assessment of a 20-year veteran officer I know, because, though they were not like the property-destroying goons depicted in Midnight Express, they were indeed a group of uneducated (Turks would call them “cahil”), defensive bullies.
In the late nineties, however, the direction and thinking at the national level changed dramatically, and a concerted effort was put into creating a better-trained, more respectable policeman. They raised the bar considerably for acceptance as a candidate at the police academy and increased instruction from 6 months to 2 years (note for comparison that the current course at the Los Angeles Police Academy for the Los Angeles Police Department is only 6 months).The curriculum, while once not very serious-minded or socially responsible, became one that was. Now, about 10 years later, and basing my judgment on knowing 15 or so younger policemen, I’d have to say they have been very successful in raising the quality of officers.
Bicycle-riding cops in Paris, ca. 1935
The Bicycle Horn Bust
I am personally able to make a comparison between then and now because I did in fact have significant contract with the police in the town of Ayvalik in 1995. This was when I had first moved to a house on the island of Cunda, which is inhabited by mostly fishermen and olive growers. There were no other resident foreigners around at the time, and my living there by myself was apparently endless fodder for their gossip.
I had been there about 6 months when, having come home one evening from work, a man in a trench coat intercepted me as I stepped off the bus. He escorted me to a car with two other men in the front seat and motioned me to sit in the back with him. I thought right off I was being arrested, though I hadn’t a clue as to the reason. Speaking a kind of Tarzanesque English-Turkish to me, they asked me questions which I didn’t understand but had words in them such as “antique, Greece, agent, CIA and kacakci (Turkish word for smuggler).” I guessed I was suspected of being a smuggler of Turkish antiques to Greece, or a CIA agent, or both. Finally, after a whole hour in the car, it was suggested that we go into my house, where they could look for evidence. I think they were pretty sure they were going to blow off my cover as an English teacher.
The four of us entered the house about 7 p.m. but they didn’t leave until almost one in the morning. In that time, they went through every square centimeter of the place, and even combed the floorboards for a secret hatch. They found two things after all this that they were sure incriminated me, and I could see on their faces that they were pleased that they now had evidence against me. One was a Pakistani bicycle horn, belonging to my Turkish-Belgian landlords, which they were sure was a protected antique (prohibited from export) from the south of Turkey. The second item was box containing three papier mache masks made by an artist friend who had stored her personal possessions with me. The cops were positive they too were contraband, even though, as I pointed out, the masks were signed on the back “J. de Bourre 1994.”
What made the cops seem even more clueless to me was that right there on the living room floor, where I had been cleaning it, was my collection of antique Turkish wedding crowns (tepelik), which look kind of precious because they’re made of a silver alloy. There were about 25 pieces, true antiques, looking like I was ready to ship them off, but the police never looked at or even asked one question about them. Also, though the access panel was clearly visible to them, they never bothered to go up into the attic and search. It was big enough so that I could have had the entire contents of Topkapi in it, but these morons would have overlooked it.
At the end of our evening together, my friends said they wouldn’t arrest me but that they were going to take the bicycle horn and the masks to the police station and get back to me. Then- what chutzpah! – they asked me to make Turkish coffee for them before they left.
(I had neither Turkish coffee nor a proper cezve to make it in, and I panicked that they would change their minds and arrest me. To my relief- segments from “Midnight Express” were beginning to play in my head - they settled for instant.)
"When I hid the bicycle horn, I never thought
they'd look in the samovar"
The next day I went to see the kaymakam, a federally-appointed provincial governor whose many jobs include meeting with the police and jandarma (military police, a phonetic spelling of the French "gendarme") every day to review their planned activities. I was on a first name basis with him (we had done each other favors) and I thought he might be able to intervene and save my ass.
He had been told of the police plan to descend on me the day before, and, he said, pleaded with the police chief to let me alone, but the chief said he had to act on the basis of letters sent to them by two different people reporting my nefarious activities: one said I was a smuggler, the other that I was CIA. That they had found nothing- someone in the department with “worldly” knowledge identified the horn and masks for what they were – didn’t prompt any apology from the chief, even at the insistence of the Kaymakam, but he assured me the chief would not pull a second stunt.
The kaymakam also apologized to me for the competency of the officers who visited me, apparently a special squad assigned to protect “antiquities and old money” but who certainly knew nothing about either of them. But, as he said, that was typical in Turkey with its deficient public educational system.
(“The Antiquities and Old Money Brigade” is how I most often heard the translation of the official Turkish name of this unit. But “old” here really means “ancient,” because were talking about Greek and Roman coins.)
Actually, it’s no more the result of lame education than it is of a standard way of doing things in business and government whereby people are given jobs with absolutely no concern about whether they know the first thing required. In both state and private sectors you see a general disregard for real qualifications when a job is filled and thereafter for even minimal competency in its performance.
Often this occurs when someone has some relatively high educational qualifications. If you have a masters degree in, say, construction engineering, this would impress the employer that you were a capable of doing a wide variety of jobs regardless of whether they were related to the construction field- even if the duties were in a whole different world, such as director of tourism or educational consultant. I personally know of a masters graduate in psychology who got a job as a director in the part of the department of agriculture that inspects meat. As my Berkeley friend Groucho might observe, “Lucky there were no openings in the department that inspects nuclear reactors!”
A Turkish policeman in the 1950s.
But this total disregard for competency is also common at lower levels, such as in state offices, where people move up the ladder to a job out of their league through connections, or as a reward, which really means they get promoted for having done a personal favor. Though this kind of thing is reportedly on the wane in the “New Turkey,” fading mainly in the private sector, 15 years ago it adequately explains why the team from the Antiquities and Old Money Brigade could have been mistaken for the Three Stooges.
In imagining how this trio ever got promoted, here is as plausible scenario for one of them as a beat cop:
Looking to go up the pay scale, our boy keeps radar out for any openings. He hears of a place in the Antiquities and Old Money Brigade before it is even official, and he knows it’s time to make his chief beholden to him. But because he has anticipated this moment, he has already probed his colleagues as to his boss’s needs. Those who work alongside the chief reported that he is obsessed with buying a new car- specifically a black Volkswagen SUV, which is perfect for the image a police chief wants to project in Turkish civilian life. Our boy had also had the foresight to inform his extended family that for the sake of his career and his family he needs to get a deal on a VW SUV. Some relatives in Malatya, 1200 Kilometers in the east, have already announced that an uncle, one of his father’s 12 siblings, is friends with the assistant manager at the Malatya VW dealership, and that it has been arranged for the chief- how this was done is a whole other layer to the story- to get a car at dealer’s price. The chief is thrilled at the news that a new SUV could be delivered to him, and though he is unaware of what specifically getting the car will cost him above the dealer’s price, he, as a Turk, knows that by accepting the deal- and you can bet he does -he has incurred a debt and that it will soon come due. Therefore, when the job vacancy actually happens and our boy’s application is lifted off the desk by the chief’s hands, its approval is a done deal, a yawning formality.
(Whether or not there is a test for the position is irrelevant in this era, because if one can write his name he can pass it, and if he can't do that, which may have been the case with all three of them, cheating is easily accomplished.)
Looking back on the fiasco of the raid that took place at my home 15 years ago, we could condemn the police department itself for not caring whether this squad knew anything about the objects they were assigned to protect, but we know that not giving a flying fuck was standard operating procedure at the time. Who really deserves indictment are the guys themselves. Not for the reason they lacked intelligence or common sense, which they certainly did, but because they had obviously never felt the responsibility to learn anything about the items under their watch. A little elementary research might have told them that bicycle horns were not a big part of Suleyman’s reign. (Or perhaps they thought they were car horns.) For their own sakes, we can only hope that these boys retire before openings come up in the top of the pay scale: the bomb squad.
Now, 15 years later, you would be hard pressed to find a group of officers under 30 that were as crude and as bumbling as this Ayvalik team. Not only are the officers more competent, but- and this is a first for Turkey -police address people in the street as sir or madam.
From a personal standpoint, I would hope they also learn to avoid storing arms on bus benches and refrain from asking the suspect to make coffee.
Best and the Brightest
I know firsthand what goes on at the police academy nowadays because, as I’ve said, I’ve been teaching their cadets. This year, 2011, I taught a group of 10. I developed a close relationship with several of them, mainly because I genuinely liked them, and came away with more than a little insider information. I have also been to the academy as a guest on several occasions.
One of my students on graduation day.
In regard to police corruption, for example, and to the challenge of changing the behavior of a police force once known to rival Mexico’s in expecting payoffs, I understand the new training has made some dents in the old order. Although there can be no true statistics about how many policemen past or present take money for favors, the fact that my students were abhorred by the idea of bribes, and vowed to me they would never succumb to the temptation is encouraging enough. Though you could dismiss it as mere naiveté certain to give way to reality a bit later, just the advent of idealism is unquestionably a step up for the police in Turkey.
(It impressed me as a teaching technique that in the local police academy’s course on ethics, the instructor shows the film “Serpico,” in which Al Pacino, one of the Turks’ all time favorite actors, plays a heroic figure resisting bribes.)
A fact that might surprise some westerners with stereotypical notions about countries like Turkey is that the academy curriculum truly makes an effort to teach that torture is wrong. Instructors warn that it will be met with severe punishment and caution that there is CCTV everywhere nowadays.
Of course if you were a Kurd in eastern Turkey, you might question if the actual incidence of torture has really waned of late. Nevertheless, like with the issue of police corruption, the mere fact that there is someone talking about it merits our congratulations.
But most interesting to me, the cadets are told that if they are working as traffic police and encounter a violator who turns out to be another policeman, they shouldn’t wave him or her on but instead issue a citation like they were anybody else.
If this were part of the official curriculum at the L.A. Police Academy it would be noteworthy, but it is all the more impressive in a place like Turkey where connections between people- as friends, as relatives, even as just being from the same town - have always been so important in getting favors.
I myself receive preferential treatment routinely, and because it’s so usual here, I suffer little guilt. A typical example would be my paying the water bill without waiting in the queue because I am on a first name basis with the clerk. Or, to illustrate how important your hometown can be even if it’s not your hometown, consider this: a few years ago when I was waiting in line to receive papers for my Turkish citizenship, we got called to the window before about 20 people who had arrived ahead of us because on my application we had filled in earlier we had listed my hometown as Malatya (my wife’s), which was, we learned, the proud provenance of the clerk’s family.
Keep in mind that Turkey is a young republic, weighed by centuries of Ottoman authoritarianism, whose people and government really don’t have democratic reflexes built in, and that the idea of non-favoritism as a rule is not automatically considered a good thing. The fact that this ideal has seeped into the national police organization of all places is some cause to feel hopeful about Turkey’s democratic future.
However, there is another reason the caliber of policemen is getting better here, perhaps just as important as the advent of better instruction. This is that the pool of candidates selected for the police academy has become more intelligent and more capable each year. This is a result of both a merit based selection process (i.e., exam centered) that the government uses for hiring in state jobs and an ever-increasing number of applicants.
Currently, as the future feels uncertain and university degrees seem worthless, some of the brightest young people are heading to state jobs, including that of policeman. You don’t get rich, but you can count on your monthly salary, and you can expect a livable retirement. This reasoning particularly resonates in a country like Turkey, where life can be hard.
Graduation ceremonies at the academy, June, 2011. The guys up front are resting AK47s on their toes.
Every police station in Turkey has at east one man stationed outside with an AK 47 or MP5 slung around his neck.
The only hitch is that to get such a job requires you to fend off hundreds of thousands of competitors in an exam. The position of federal clerk, such as in the post office, is an attractive job to many young people, but it has an exam that asks questions about mathematics, the Turkish language and general world knowledge, and is difficult enough to require that any serious aspirant, however bright, take at least a six-month preparation course.
The police has its own test similar in difficulty to the civil service exam, but with additional physical screening. It’s a tough selection process- I’ve known two students who seemed quite capable to fail it – but for young job seekers it is worth trying considering that the salary is twice that of a public school teacher.
As a testament to the higher aptitude of candidates for police training, I should point out that the group of ten I taught this year had all graduated from an Anatolian high school, or Anadolu Lisesi, which is a state high school for the brightest students. Normally, I think you would expect those kind of students to enroll in university.
Two of my students had in fact been in university but decided their time would be better spent learning something that actually led to a job, so they quit and applied for police school. Now that they’ve graduated, they can’t help but feel pleased with themselves when they are witness to the thousands of Turkish university graduates in biology, chemistry or even engineering that constantly send out resumes to no notice.
It’s interesting to me also that half of my group expressed the fact that they really did not want to be policemen, anymore than one wants to be a postal clerk, but that the healthy salary, with retirement after 20 years, makes it palatable. In fact, if you marry another officer, it’s more than palatable: you will be able to live a financially worry-free life here with absolutely secure jobs.
I can truly say that of all the classes I have taught in the last few years, this one with policemen was the brightest and most knowledgeable about the world. I usually teach university students, whom one would think would be better, but in fact there is no contest between them.
This is also the appraisal of a British teaching colleague who spent one hour a week in three of other police classes, as he did in most all the classes in the school. He called them the “brightest” students in the school and based his assessment on the fact that they were generally better able to do his class activities. For example, he gave a sheet of riddles and easy brain teasers to all of his classes (e.g., “If a plane crashes right on the border between two countries, how do they decide where to bury the survivors?” which, of course, is harder to figure in a foreign language) and the police classes were the only ones to do it reasonably well.
It’s One-Stop Shopping with the Turkish Police
Modern Day conversation in Turkey between a family, stopping to ask directions, and a policeman on the street:
Father of family: So when we see this old barn, we turn…is the turn before or after the barn?
Policeman: You take the first right turn after you pass the barn, then follow that road exactly 2.6 kilometers, when you will see and get on an on ramp to the freeway on the right . Got it?
Father: Yeah, great. But we’ve got another question for you. My son’s doing a practice test for high school admission, and he answered the question “What is the capital of Australia?” with “Sydney,” but the key says something else…Cranberra or something, which can’t be right. It’s gotta be Sydney. You wouldn’t happen to know…
Policeman: Canberra, you mean. Can, not Cran. Yes, it’s the capital. Has been since 1908, when it was selected over the much larger cities of, yes, Sydney as well as Melbourne. It’s an unusual city because it was entirely planned by…
Father: Fine, thank you, but one last question and we won’t bother you anymore. My wife and I have been thinking about long term investment for our son’s education and wonder if you would favor buying gold or…
Don't Mention it, Chief!
The author, in plainclothes, awaits his certificate thanking him for teaching the course and "contributing to the cultural life of the students."
Love to Hate’em
Although I have expressed positive feelings about the Turkish police, it’s not at all true that the Turkish people share my enthusiasm. When at the beginning of the 2010-11 academic year my school’s management called a meeting to propose a course for police academy students, they were incredulous at my eagerness, especially when I rejoiced, “Oh great, I love policemen!” After a long silence, as though I had committed some great cultural faux pas, somebody finally piped up, “Peter, excuse me, but nobody in Turkey likes policemen. They are necessary sometimes, but generally they are your enemy.”
This dislike of police comes partly from the influence of the Middle East region, where they have often been regarded with fear and mistrust and as agents of an oppressive non-democratic government.
(This is a good spot to point out that, despite what you have heard about Turkey being a country with European ideals, it really shares more of the cultural values and beliefs of its neighbors, like Iraq and Syria. The antipathy toward police is just one example.)
Still, the attitude toward police is slightly different in Turkey because, unlike the Arab countries in the region, it has more or less been a democratic republic since the 1950s. Even the worst moments of state repression in modern Turkish history cannot carry the weight of the consistent, long term oppression of al-Assad’s Syria or Mubarak’s Egypt. Unlike in those places, the police here, though never loved, have not, at least for the past 50 years, been seen as agents doing the dirty work for some corrupt regime.
(Turkey was founded as a democratic republic in 1923, though some "unofficial" historians say true democracy didn't begin until the 1950s. In the time since, we would do well not to dismiss the periods when democracy was truly on life support, as during the reign of the military after the coup in 1980, a time which was rife with arrests, torture and hangings.) )
What did taint the police here is, as I have pointed out, the long period during which the Turkish police were a mainly a group of uneducated, untrained bullies. Up until the 80s or 90s, what constituted law in Turkey was oftentimes a nebulous matter, and policemen, who were in the first place defensive about how people perceived their ability and authority, liked to push people around, interpreting the law however it suited them to prove themselves. Needless to say, their public image was less than sterling.
In the 70s, during the terrible period of political strife and anarchy, the police further worsened their image by taking sides in the street battles between the communists, socialists and the fascists. As they were busy fighting amongst themselves, the Army took over their role and were then perceived as heroes for saving many people from the violence of the times. That is to say, the Turkish police not only missed the chance to bond with the people, but they ended up tarnishing their reputation for decades.
My daily observations tell me, however, that the school management was exaggerating its case about how Turks regard the police in 2011. I think they were mainly echoing the negative sentiments of their parents, who lived through the 70s’ strife, but I don’t believe they think the shoe fits nowadays.
These days people appear to approach the police on the street with unselfconscious ease, and at cafes and restaurants it is a common sight- unheard of in the States- to see policemen sitting together at tables with ordinary folks. I’d say the old idea of the police as crude bullies has in the presence of the new force eroded at least by half.
Sign Me Up!
In this promotional video for the police, I was disappointed to learn that the part of the policewoman is played by a Cypriot pop singer.
In any case, slagging off the cops is a world sport, and the kind of comments heard in my school meeting may be just as prevalent in the U.S. As the police cadets are want to say, when they need to console themselves about their choice of profession, “Everyone pretends to hate cops, but only as long as they don’t need them.”
Burn it Down, Baby
But if we congratulate the police on their complete makeover, we should also point out that the opportunity to build a new, better police force came about because the old one was so bad it had to be ditched.
This theme, of abandoning the old, non-working system and starting fresh, helps to explain how Turkey, and many other Asian nations, came to be astoundingly better places to live in just a couple of decades.
Take the telephone system in Turkey as another example of a makeover. When I arrived here, it was pretty lamentable. The orange-colored public phones which I used daily worked on jetons you got from the post office, like the French phones up until the mid-eighties, except that they were more often in disrepair. You’d be lucky if one of two worked.
Even if the phone would hook you up to your party, the quality of the connection varied considerably. (People used to joke to me: “When it rains in California, the phones act up in Turkey.”) Especially on long distance- which may as well have been defined as anywhere outside the residential block you were calling from- the voice in the receiver on both ends, if it was heard over the static, receded cyclically during the conversation so that to compensate one soon developed a 120 decibel telephone voice. In fact, even today in the age of cell phones, people of that era, especially men over 40, still speak into the receiver so loudly that you would hear them clearly standing twenty feet from the launch of an Atlas rocket.
Then in the early-, mid-90s the phone system was completely remade by the French. The new technology was so good that when I went home for visits in the States, I found our public telephones at the airport backward and confusing by comparison.
(To be fair, however, our more confusing system was partly a result of there being so many competing players in the field, as opposed to one national telecom in Turkey.)
Both the police and the telephone system got redesigned and rebuilt from scratch because they were so deficient that repairing them would have been nonsense. In contrast, in the States we often just patch up or make partial improvement to a system because we regard it as functioning to the point that replacing it is not urgent. What this means is that Turkey can be more advanced in certain respects- or at least have some better components of infrastructure - than the U.S. (That’s not entirely news, for no one has been bragging about the American infrastructure of late.)
Though I have a fervent admiration for the Turk’s efforts at modernization, as you can well see, I wouldn’t want you to be misled. Let me be the first to point out that Turkey has not by any means successfully revamped all the things that it should. Many parts of the governmental organization have remained in an unchanging pathetic state for at least the last 50 years. As an observer of some of their escapades for the last 20 years, you can take my word for it that some of these enterprises should be - and you will forgive me for my harshness –terminated with extreme prejudice.
Just for starters, I’d recommend that the ministry of education be shuttered and padlocked immediately. Not only that, the higher-ups who populate this body- paradigms of the sort of incompetence I mentioned - should be arrested and banished from the country. (I would relish sending in my friend Yusuf and a team of swat to empty the building.) Moreover, they should be exiled far enough away so that when Turkey does begin to re-conceive the ministry and reappoint staff, these dolts wouldn’t have a chance to contaminate the project.
But there are indeed things- the amazing, completely redesigned health care system is another one - which the Turks are doing well these days. Taking a look at these remade systems could afford us the opportunity to go one step further when we decide it’s time to redo our own. I don’t think the Turks could give us any lessons in engineering or technology, but in some other areas we might be able to glean something. I’m suggesting that we begin reciprocating the course that’s been followed for the last 80 years, where Turks from all fields have been sent to the U.S. for education or training, and send some professions here to observe and learn. We could start with a team of cops.
What could they learn, you may ask? Right off, they- and I hope this would include administrators -would observe and appreciate the high quality of a police force hired according to merit, where the most capable get the job. I’m fully aware that such a hiring practice instituted by just some of the local police departments in the U.S. would, assuming that the jobs were attractive enough to invite competition, be met by hundreds of court cases. But if you could witness and appreciate first hand the salient differences in intelligence and competency of police chosen on merit, you’d consider any legalistic battles to allow it as worth the pain.
Cadets training in the field on the first of May, a day that in Turkey can be rife with unruly assemblies.
I imagine Groucho tapping his cigar and wisecracking, "These cops can restore my public order anytime they want."
Secondly- and this is most important to me -they would observe a cop with a demeanor that was friendly but one who was effective and in control, a combination that they would never imagine possible.
If I proposed that 10 LAPD officers be sent to Bursa to be in the care of my friend Yusuf, the swat team commander, for one summer, I’m fully aware that it sounds like a premise for a “Police Academy” film, but I couldn’t be more earnest. It would change their lives, professionally and otherwise. For once, they might feel they had permission to smile, and when they got back home and walked through a Denny’s restaurant on their way to the counter, they might actually be invited to sit down at one of the tables.
Okuduğunuz için Teşekkür!
Thanks for Reading!
