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Accusations of corruption are rife against officers often targeted by terrorists

At night, the police presence is  evident. On the city's central streets, they make high-speed patrols, sometimes in groups that make the task appear more like a joyride.

There are no other cars to be seen and there is virtually no one on the streets, save the employees of Baghdad's single 24-hour shop and the handful of restaurants that stay open late, mostly to serve police officers.

The police, however, do not receive credit for an apparent drop in crime.

'It's because no one stays out,' said Hassan Mahdi, the owner of the 24-hour shop. 'The police are no good.'

Just because the streets are filled with police does not necessarily mean they are safe.

A journalist walking back to his hotel about 3am on a recent morning made the mistaken assumption that it would be fine because only police were out.

He was stopped and asked for his ID three times during the 10-minute stroll. The third group of police also took US$100 from his wallet, after he showed an American passport.

Accusations of police corruption are rampant across the country. Iraqis complain police set up checkpoints for the sole purpose of shakedowns, threatening arrest unless a bribe is paid.

In Baghdad, a city of more than 5  million, the police were the first security body to be reinstated after the invasion. The situation is being likened to the police force before the invasion, which was known for its petty corruption.

'No one ever received traffic tickets before the war,' said Ahmad Ayad, who lives in Baghdad. 'We just paid the officer.'

There are now 8,000 police working inside Baghdad, a number that is expected to increase, despite plans to continue reviewing the status of some of the police who were officers before the invasion. 'Ninety-nine per cent of those were police officers before the war,' said Major Bassem Hamid Mahmoud, a spokesman for the chief of police.

At the Police Internal Affairs office, Captain Rafid Daoud has handled 300 complaints since July 20. There is no electricity, so he cannot access the database of cases on his computer to give a breakdown of the cases, but he says 25 officers have been dismissed as a result of his investigations.

'We try to make the [the police] clean,' he said. 'In our job, there are many bad officers. We caught some who were working with kidnappers.' He pauses to examine a brand-new Glock pistol - the US military is slowly equipping Iraqi police with the same pistol army officers wear - and sighs.

'We must clean our country of the bad,' he says.

But as some efforts are being made to shed old stigmas, the vase of flowers on Captain Daoud's desk speaks to a problem the police have never before faced.

Since last May, at least 158 officers have been killed in shootings or bombings targeting police. American troops have lost 229 soldiers to hostile fire during the same  period.

'The Iraqi police have become the only authority on the street, and because of that, we are the enemy of the terrorists,' Major Mahmoud said.

The corrupt practices may partly be fuelled by the meagre rewards from the job.

'Our salary is very low and this is a very bad situation - there is inflation and we might lose our lives,' said Raad Salman, the chief of the Al-Awiyah police station in Baghdad. 'They told us they would increase our pay, but we have not seen it yet. Sometimes the pay is 10 days late, sometimes two weeks.'

Current pay scales for a normal officer are little more than US$60 a month. Major Mahmoud claims a pay raise is planned, to around $100 in the coming months to more than double that afterward, but officers say they will believe it when they see it. In occupied Iraq, planned pay scales often fail to materialise when promised.



Poorly paid police give Baghdad's streets scant security