MOSCOW Beaten lawmaker takes aim at police brutality

People are more afraid of the police than they are of the mafia.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
MOSCOW -- Ivan Musatov would not have gotten involved normally. In this violent city, it wasn't that unusual to see two men beating up another young man on a sidewalk. It was the way they were doing it. Photographing it with a cell phone. First one would knock the youth's slumping head with a fist under his chin, then the other would snap a picture.
Musatov, a deputy in the Russian parliament, didn't need to be in the middle of someone else's trouble. But when they started dragging the weakened man into the bushes, Musatov jumped out of his car. The two men turned on Musatov, and when the lawmaker's friend also rushed in, a dozen or more men sprang out of a nearby cafe and began beating both of them. Musatov got to his cell phone and called his wife. "Come to the Paveletsky train station," he pleaded. "They're killing me."
Three nearby shopkeepers shouted that they were calling the police. "We are the police," one of the attackers said curtly.
By the time it was over, Musatov had three broken ribs, a concussion and a black eye. His friend was covered in blood, with damage to his stomach and liver. And three of the officers, all off-duty at the time, were under investigation for hooliganism and abuse of office.
Worse than the mafia
"Russian people are much more scared of the police than they are of the mafia, because the police are more dangerous," said Musatov's wife, Anastasia Mikhailovskaya, sharing lunch with her husband at a downtown restaurant last week as he was discharged from one hospital and preparing to check into another.
Of all the hazards that menace a Russian as he leaves his house each day -- drunken drivers, Chechen terrorists -- none as a rule inspires more dread than the street-corner cop who halts someone going into the subway and directs him into the feared militsia office in the corner.
In a poll conducted by the respected Levada Center, 38 percent of respondents ranked terrorists and drug dealers as the second and third most criminal professions in Russia, behind the police. A separate poll in March showed that 56 percent of Moscow residents feared the police.
At his annual state of the nation address in April, President Vladimir V. Putin acknowledged that reforming the police had become a national priority. "We need law-enforcement authorities that a law-abiding citizen can be proud of, rather than crossing over to the other side of the street at the sight of a uniformed man," he said.
Hot line
Musatov, a 29-year-old deputy with the Liberal Democratic Party, is nominally in the political opposition but comes from a strongly nationalist party that generally supports an authoritarian bent in government. Yet the lawmaker announced that as a result of the Aug. 26 attack, he was organizing a telephone hot line for citizens to call with complaints about the police.
He said he believed the officers who attacked him, whom he believes to have been a drunken mix of new recruits and experienced officers celebrating a recent police academy graduation, would have killed the youth, and possibly him, if bystanders had not called police from other stations to the scene.
Even then after a large number of uniformed police arrived, Musatov said, he was left lying handcuffed on the sidewalk and was repeatedly kicked in the ribs and had his head banged against the pavement by officers who claimed his parliament credential was a forgery.
"One of the officers who was in plainclothes threatened to rape me. He said, 'We will take you to the police station and we will [assault] you there.' He was holding up his private parts like Michael Jackson in a dance."