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More than half Russians confide in police – opinion polls

About a third of the polled said they had negative attitudes to police

MOSCOW, November 6 (Itar-Tass) —— More than half of Russians confide in national police, according opinion polls conducted by the All-Russia Centre for the Study of the Public Opinion (VCIOM).

“The level of people’s confidence in law enforcer agencies in terms of personal and property safety has gone up in the past two years from 33 to 52 percent,” VCIOM director Valery Fyodorov said.

“Of course, it is a far cry from 80-85 percent in some Western countries,” but still it is much higher than it was two years ago “in the thick of scandals around the behavior of certain policemen,” he noted.

About a third of the polled said they had negative attitudes to police, he said.

According to Fyodorov, the highest level of confidence was reported in the Far Eastern Chukotka autonomous area, and in Altai, while the lowest levels were reported in the Murmansk, Tomsk, Leningrad, Voronezh regions, and in the Khabarovsk territory.

The polls were conducted in 80 Russian regions from March to September, embracing 42,000 respondents, the VCIOM director added.