Several hundred activists, at a rally in Moscow on March 6, demanded an overhaul of Russia's notoriously and increasingly corrupt police force, arguing that the reform of the service ordered by President Dmitry Medvedev in December and recent firings of senior police officials could not produce any serious effect. The Interior Ministry said in December that the crime rate in the police force, which retains its official Soviet-era misnomer “militia,” had risen 20 percent year on year. The same month the leader of a rights group said, citing an anonymous opinion poll by the Regional Development Ministry, that 60 percent of crime victims preferred not to contact the police “because, as a result, there would be nothing but trouble and a waste of time while there is a risk of [threats] from persons who have been reported.” Medvedev issued a decree in December to reform and downsize the police, whose criminal record includes violent crime and false convictions as well as bribes. “There have recently been increasingly frequent violations of law and service discipline by militia personnel, which give rise to a justifiable negative public reaction and weaken the influence of state authority,” he said in the document. The decree ordered a set of anti-corruption measures, including revision of “the procedure for the selection of candidates for service in [the police force] from the point of view of their moral, ethical and psychological characteristics,” rotation of senior police officials, “anti-corruption education programs” for “various categories” of police, and revision of the performance assessment system in the service. Other measures prescribed by the decree were raising pay for police, who are notoriously low-paid, providing them with better housing, and reducing Russia's police personnel 20 percent by 2012. The president followed up the move in February by firing 17 police generals, including two deputy interior ministers and eight regional police chiefs. However, those who came to the March 6 rally, organized by various human rights and opposition groups and held on Triumfalnaya Square in central Moscow, argued that Medvedev's measures were insufficient and raised demands that included firing Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev, seriously raising pay for police and putting them under public control, and ending the practice of using police as a tool for political persecution. They also demanded independent investigations into offenses by police reported by whistleblowers such as Alexei Dymovsky, who became famous in November after a series of YouTube videos in which he accused fellow police officers of crimes and urged Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to intervene. Dymovsky, whose story was featured on Global Voices in November 2009, was discharged from the police, arrested in January on a charge of fraud, and released from custody over the weekend. Supporters of Dymovsky recently set up a website, www.dymovskiy.name, on which they try to put lawlessness in the police force in the limelight. There have been quite a lot of online comments on the police corruption problem and on the March 6 rally, most of their authors agreeing that a major reform is needed but some claiming there is not much wrong with the police and attacking reform advocates. Government daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta has published many comments on its website, and below are three of them. Nikolai: I don't think that anything will change in our country because it isn't a disease of the police alone but a disease of the whole society. The police have just brought this into focus because they are before everyone's eyes. You just take a closer look and you'll see that one of the most worthless officials behaves as though he is the hub of the universe. And look at the president as well. Whereas in the States, the president has only two residences, ours has more than fifteen and is going to build another one, worth more than seven billion. And it will be located in a nature reserve as well, which is in gross violation of the law of the Russian Federation. And so any official, including those in the Interior Ministry, thinks as he is looking at all that: If it's allowed THERE, why shouldn't it be allowed to me? And smaller fry take the same path when they look at their superiors. So that's it, the circle has closed.