Depoliticisation as a Key Component of Police Reforms in Post-Socialist Countries: The Case of Croatia

In all post-socialist countries in Central and South-Eastern Europe, community policing is expected to rebuild police legitimacy. The Croatian Community Policing Strategy, launched in 2003, represented the continuation of reforms that were following the socio-political and economic changes in the 1990s. The Croatian Community Policing Strategy originally encompassed six projects. One of them, the Internal democratisation of the police, aimed at adequate positioning of uniformed police, and achieving, in particular, a clear and transparent promotion system, which also means depoliticisation of the police. The main goal of the paper is to analyse the project results in relation to the overall police reform in Croatia and the level of community policing implementation. The analysis included a representative sample of 500 Croatian police officers. Data were collected based on a questionnaire that included relevant sets of indicators of the community policing implementation at the organisation level. The given results show that almost two thirds (73.4%) of respondents perceive the depoliticisation of the Croatian police as weak. Multivariate analysis reveals the differences in the level of overall community policing evaluation in relation to the depoliticisation level.