A New Feeling for Egypt’s Bare-Knuckled Police: Fear

By KAREEM FAHIM and MAYY EL SHEIKH 

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

Egyptian police officers standing guard near a police academy in a Cairo suburb last month.

More than 150 Egyptian police officers have been killed since mid-August alone, and the attacks have affected morale on the force.

• Rocky Start in Promoting New Charter for Egypt

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

Egyptian police officers standing guard near a police academy in a Cairo suburb last month.

By KAREEM FAHIM and MAYY EL SHEIKH

Published: December 17, 2013

CAIRO — For six hours, heavily armed officers fired fusillades of buckshot and tear gas at students who were the latest front of anger toward Egypt’s military-backed rulers.

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• Rocky Start in Promoting New Charter for Egypt (December 17, 2013)

But as night fell and the students scattered last week, it was the police who seemed defeated, certain that the end of one protest simply marked a pause before the next. As two of the officers clad in black riot gear trudged away from the gates of Cairo University, one described the students as “bullies.”

“I’m not going back,” he told a friend.

Since the military ouster more than five months ago of President Mohamed Morsi, the interim leaders’ strategy of relying on the police to stamp out opposition and to help stabilize the country has met with little success. Over the last three years of revolt, protesters have refused to be silenced, even when the authorities use deadly force.

And Egypt has also become far more dangerous for the authorities, with more than 150 police officers killed since mid-August alone. The attacks on the police have affected morale on the force, officers said, and raised troubling questions about the government’s ability to secure the country in the face of increasingly frequent attacks by militants.

“Before, it was dramatic to lose an officer,” said one senior police official who serves in southern Egypt. Now, he said, “the likelihood has become normal.”

Between the attacks, including by armed jihadists, and the nonstop protests, the police, already poorly trained and equipped, have been stretched thin. On Thursday, at least one officer was killed and 20 were injured when a bomb detonated at a police camp in the Suez Canal city of Ismailia, in the kind of attack that has become commonplace.

Officers have been pulled from their regular details to police demonstrations or secure suddenly vulnerable public buildings. They have also been called on to ensure compliance with a new law that criminalizes unauthorized gatherings — a law that the senior officer called “unenforceable.”

In a sign of the growing anger, hundreds of officers held a rare protest this month, the first by officers since the military takeover, demanding higher wages.

The new pressures on the police have served to highlight their longstanding abysmal reputation, including for torture and corruption. Complaints about police abuses helped fuel the 2011 uprising against President Hosni Mubarak, but since then, none of Egypt’s leaders have made any serious effort to reform the department.

After the military takeover, the police declared a new era in the relationship with the country. The department’s failings persisted — and even grew worse — but the police won support from a public weary from years of instability and crime.

There was little uproar, for instance, during the deadly crackdown on Mr. Morsi’s supporters, Islamists cast by officials as enemies of the state. But as other demonstrations flared, including by non-Islamist activists, police officials again cast them as conspiracies against the country, and spoke confidently about their ability to contain them.

The students, though, have been harder to dismiss, and the forceful response to the protests has drawn more controversy and criticism of the police.

The protests intensified after the police were accused of killing a Cairo University student, Mohamed Reda, with birdshot last month. The Interior Ministry has reacted defensively to the charge that its officers are using excessive force.

As Egypt’s leaders struggle to quell the protests, two senior officers spoke about the growing toll on the force as the crisis drags on.

Friends and relatives on the force have been killed and their police stations have come under attack, they said. They complained that the public did not seem to notice their sacrifices, but they also faulted the military-backed government for relying so heavily on the police to try to resolve its own political confrontations and restore stability without addressing public concerns.  The officers families have been torn apart by the same arguments that divide the rest of society. And their relatives have grown increasingly worried for the officers’ safety, after a campaign of attacks by jihadist groups targeting the police and the army.

And they have grown increasingly terrified of the threat from jihadist groups that have waged an almost daily campaign against the army and the police.

The run of lethal strikes began soon after the security services violently dispersed two Islamist sit-in demonstrations in August, gunning down hundreds of protesters.

Two weeks later, witnesses said they saw gunmen wearing balaclavas open fire on a small police post on the outskirts of Cairo, killing an officer, as well as a furniture deliveryman who happened to be standing nearby.

The senior officer stationed in southern Egypt, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media, said men besieged the police encampment where he was stationed on the morning the Cairo sit-ins were stormed.

The Interior Ministry’s leaders had given him no warning about possible retaliation, he said. As he and the 20 officers he commanded were overwhelmed, he called the ministry for help and received none, he said.

“May God be with you,” he quoted an official as saying.

He and his colleagues hid on top of a water tower for a time, and then he took shelter in a family home near the base, he said. Since then, he has sent his family back to their hometown, worried that they would be caught up in an attack.

“People think we’re robots,” he said. “We have families.”

Another officer, Maj. Haitham Abbas, complained that the entire force had been tarnished by the response to the unrest, giving the example of a colleague who works in a unit that guards tourists and who suddenly had to defend himself in front of his 12-year-old son.

“They told his son at school: ‘Your father is a murderer. He kills people in the streets,’ ” the officer said. “He probably never even pulled his gun out.”

“I love my profession,” Major Abbas said. He added, “There are things that I don’t like in my own ministry and things that I criticize the ministry for,” mentioning insufficient training.

His normal job is securing the Nile, but these days he is frequently asked to respond to protests — “so much that I don’t have time to do my original job, though it’s important,” he said.

With no relief in sight, the officers acknowledged that a police response alone would do little to quiet Egypt’s restive cities and towns.

“The government must find a legitimate mechanism for change instead of having people march in the streets every time they have a complaint,” Major Abbas said. 

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