The Armenian police have solved fewer crimes this year because they were busy
enforcing official results of the February presidential election and cracking
down on the opposition after the post-election unrest, a senior police official
said on Tuesday.



The police claim to have solved less than 69 percent of 6,825 crimes officially
registered across Armenia in the first nine months of this year. The proportion
was down from almost 72 percent reported during the same period of 2007. The
police statistics show that the drop in the efficiency rate was particularly
steep in the category of murders and other serious crimes.



“That is mainly conditioned by the presidential elections and the post-election
developments,” Colonel Sayat Shirinian, the chief spokesman for the national
police service, told a news conference. “You are well aware that police units of
the Republic of Armenia were overloaded with work. That fact could not have
failed to reflect on the effectiveness of solving crimes.”



Shirinian assured journalists that the police will improve their performance in
the coming months.



The police played a key role in the bloody March 1 suppression of post-election
demonstrations staged in Yerevan by the opposition presidential candidate Levon
Ter-Petrosian. More than a hundred of his supporters were arrested in the
following weeks.



The police efficiency has decreased even faster in absolute terms, given an
almost 5 percent increase in the total number of crimes which the police say
were committed in Armenia from January-September 2008.



Shirinian attributed the increase to a crackdown on the underreporting of crimes
by police divisions across the country. He insisted that the situation with
crimes is “fully under control” despite an unprecedented series of deadly
shootings reported late last month. He said most of them have already been
solved.



According to the police figures, Armenia’s crime rate remains significantly
below that of Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet republics.

By Hovannes Shoghikian