As it is known, the RA Police are trying to keep secret the information on the number of police officers and vehicles in the country. However, different police officials publish figures which require simple arithmetic to receive the total number of officers of the Police and Police Troops. Similarly, it is very easy to reveal the number of police vehicles by using open sources.
“Union of Informed Citizens” has decided to publish a series of non-confidential information related to the staff of the RA Police and the Police Troops, as well as the number of vehicles possessed by them.
Staff
In order to calculate the number of police officers, “Union of Informed Citizens” sent an inquiry to the Head of RA Police, requesting information on the average salary of the officers. According to letter N 13/2206 received from Head of Finance and Budget Department of the RA Police, the average gross salary of police officers and police troops is 228.600 AMD. And according to N 13/3807 letter, the officers receive an average of 223.500 AMD as a reward. In other words, one police officer annually receives a gross income of about 3 million AMD. During the same year of 2016, about 30.9 billion AMD was spent from the state budget of the RA Police under the budget line “salary and rewards of employees”. From that amount, 10.6 million AMD was paid as a bonus to about 1.100 police officers who are special civil servants. Dividing the salary fund into annual average gross salary and reward of the police officer, we will get the total number of police officers and police troops. And that number makes up 10.400.
It should be added that salaries have also been paid from the Extrabudgetary Fund of the RA Police. Thus, 6.3 billion AMD was paid as salaries for security services (mainly), 1.9 billion to the Road Police, and 270 million to the Passport Department. About 3100 police officers receive salaries with that amount, 2300 of which are involved in security guardianship activities (many private organizations use the guard services of the RA Police, including banks, shops, etc.). Thus, about 3100 employees (or most of them) are difficult to qualify as police officers in classical sense (this is a matter of assessment).
This number slightly diverges from Deputy Head of RA Police Vardan Yeghiazaryan’s statement on the amount of budget allocations per police officer that he made last year. Major general Yeghiazaryan announced that the budget allocation for one police officer made up 4.1 million AMD in 2015. The total budget of the RA Police was 36.3 billion AMD in 2015. Thus, it results that there were 8.900 police officers in Armenia then.
It can be stated that the number of police officers in Armenia is between 8.900 and 10.400. Among them, about 1100 are special civil servants. And the Police have another 3100 employees at the expense of the extrabudgetary means.
Vehicles
In order to calculate the number of vehicles possessed by the RA Police, the number of procured CMVLI contracts has been studied since according to the RA legislation, there only very few types of transport means that may not be insured.
According to the RA Law on Procurements, all the procurements (including those of CMVLI contracts) shall be open and transparent. With this principle, the CMVLI contracts of vehicles possessed by the RA Police, which contain the number of vehicles, type of CMVLI, is published in the public procurements armeps.am website.
Thus, during the previous 12 months, the Police have signed 1118 CMVLI and 41 Casco insurance contracts. 13 of them were CMVLI contracts for motorcycles. The total value of CMVLI contracts has made up more than 46 million AMD.
Moreover, it should be added that only in 2017, the Police procured 126 units of vehicles. Twelve were motorcycles, 38 were SUV, 4 were minibuses and 72 were passenger cars. The sum value of vehicles procured during 2017 made up 660 million, and a considerable part of them were Japanese “Toyota” cars made in Turkey.
It should be noted once again that the data on the vehicles are as of 2017, and those of the staff are as of 2016. All the information has been collected from open (not confidential) sources only.
Union of Informed Citizens