What happened to reform?

POLICE brutality was a big reason why angry Egyptians took to the streets on January 25th 2011, the first day of their revolution. Within days they had routed the riot-control units. For months afterwards the country’s omnipresent security services were in disarray and sullenly promised to mend their ways. But, two years later, it is increasingly evident that little has really changed.

In recent months several cases of kidnappings of prominent activists, some of whom have died after being beaten, have been attributed to the security service. In some cases policemen are said to be taking revenge for the humiliation they suffered in 2011. Sometimes they have failed to protect citizens; at other times they have persecuted them. In one instance, in Beni Suef, a fly-blown town south of the capital, policemen took revenge on a man accused of killing one of their own. Random instances of police brutality are reported almost every day, ranging from ill-treatment of minors to the killing of protesters, with shots aimed at the head. When cases of police abuse do reach the courts, acquittal or a light sentence most often ensues.

The political crisis that has engulfed Egypt in the past three months, pitting President Muhammad Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood against a range of opposition groups, has made things worse. Policemen complain that they are being asked to defend the regime from sometimes violent protests, but have to show restraint when attacked. In recent weeks the police have gone on a strike that has spread to ten of Egypt’s 27 provinces. They have often refused to protect offices of the Brotherhood that are being attacked by protesters.

An ethos of hostility to the Brotherhood persists in the interior ministry, according to Ihab Youssef, a former police colonel who co-founded a reformist group called “People and Police for Egypt”. “The police were blamed for supporting Mubarak,” he explains, referring to the deposed president. “Now they don’t want to be seen as serving the new regime.” A common refrain by the police around the country is that they “do not want to be dragged into politics”.

Mr Morsi’s administration is wooing the police by promising them more handguns, passing a law to restrict protests, making promotion easier and improving conditions for conscripts. Human-rights activists fear that, instead of trying to reform the police, the government prefers to co-opt them, with an eye eventually to imposing Brotherhood loyalists.

The interior minister, Muhammad Ibrahim, often described as close to the Brotherhood, has flatly denied claims of police brutality, even when displayed on YouTube, and has also played down the extent of the strike. A campaigner who monitors police abuses says that Mr Ibrahim’s statements amount to “an attempt to create an alternative reality”.

Yet the government and the Islamist-dominated parliament have not taken issue with him. The government’s alarm at the prospect of a police rebellion has prompted some Brotherhood members of parliament and the public prosecutor to suggest that an old law allowing citizens’ arrests should be put into effect. This has led to howls of outrage by the opposition, and accusations that Islamists are preparing to deploy their own militias.