Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

—.
Haiti: National Security
crime prevention, and the Judicial Police, a detective force that
assists the courts in carrying out criminal investigations (see
fig. 14). A separate unit, the Office of the Inspector General,
which reports to both the director general and the minister of
justice, investigates complaints against the police of human
rights abuses. The Office of the Inspector General also conducts
periodic inspections of police establishments and the
Police Academy to assure compliance with police regulations
and to evaluate the PNH's effectiveness. The office had seventytwo
people assigned to it in 1997, and more personnel were
being added. Its head was said to be seriously committed to
purging the PNH of abusive and criminal elements, but the
staff was overwhelmed as a result of trying to pursue cases of
police misbehavior while at the same time carrying out its onsite
inspection schedule.
Each of Haiti's nine departments has a departmental police
director. Beneath them are the positions of chief commissioners
(commissaires principaux) and some 130 posts of city police
chiefs or municipal commissioners (
commissaires municipaux)
The next subdivisions are the 185 subcommissariats under
chief inspectors (inspecteurs principaux) and, finally, 577 supervisory
positions of sergeants {inspecteurs) in the sub-precincts of
smaller towns and the smallest police divisions in rural and
urban areas. These smallest offices may be staffed by as few as
three policemen.
Specialized forces—the 200-member National Palace Residential
Guard, the eighty-seven member Presidential Security
Unit, and the Ministerial Security Corps — provide protection
to the political leadership. There is also a crowd control unit,
the Company for Intervention and Maintaining Order
(Compagnie d'Intervention et Maintien d'Ordre— CIMO), and
a SWAT team, the Intervention Group of the Haitian National
Police (Groupe d'Intervention de la Police Nationale d'Haiti
Each of the nine administrative regions also has its
GIPNH) .
own crowd control force. Two specialized units that had been
undergoing training began to be deployed in 1997. One was
the Haitian Coast Guard with ninety-four members; the other
was the Counternarcotics Unit under the Bureau of Criminal
Affairs with only twenty-five members.
The government has established a Special Investigative Unit
under the director of the Judicial Police to look into notorious
homicides — generally politically motivated—dating back to the
mid-1980s. About seventy such cases have been brought under
479