A year later, and Russia's "YouTube Cops" meet sad fates
There's an important post by Alexey Sidorenko over on Global Voices following up on the story of the Russian police officers who took to YouTube a year ago to tell the world of the corruption they'd observed within the force.
It all started with Alexey Dymovskiy, who posted two lengthy videos to YouTube last November pointing out the corruption in the Russian police force, going so far as to call his superiors "ignorant, reckless, boorish and dim-witted." A half a million views later, Dymovskiy's videos were getting played all over the international media, and several other Russian officers followed his footsteps onto YouTube. However, as Sidorenko reports, most of those who published videos have been fired, jailed, and/or beaten.
Writes Sidorenko:
It's not that corruption in the Russian police was unknown before Dymovskiy's video. It was the medium he chose for telling this open secret that attracted so much attention. The full disclosure of the identity of the messenger was an essential part of the message, and it introduced a new form of citizen-to-government public communication: an online video address to the president or prime minister.
Read more here.
Here's one of Dymovskiy's original videos:
5 comments:
It´s the same story in all the world, so sorry
I would to read this transcript in English..Anyone?
Not in Finland, happy about that.
Only in Russia. Nothing works there except what Finnish build to Russians. Example cleaning water, we have to pay st.petersburg wastewater purification. If we do not, they dump all waste to sea. And where it goes...yes, in Finland.
Marko, this ("Nothing works there except what Finnish build to Russians") sounds ridiculous.
But the corruption is still a big problem here. Sad to admit it.
mattsgoogle, Dymovsky's speach is a little bit awkward and weird in some places. The gist is that he was fired because of his poor health which didn't allow him to serve in police but he didn';t agree with that. And here came the conflict with his 'boss' and he blames him for corruption, says how hard it is to be a policeman but the wages are very low etc. He tells this to Putin (prime minister).
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