As a country, we are currently at the lowest point in terms of the serious and effective functioning of the police as a key segment of national security. The situation is getting worse by the day and is leading nowhere else but to a complete collapse of the system, which could be fatal to the security of citizens and the existence of the country.
The police is a complex system. Sometimes I even say that the police is the largest company in the country, with around 8,000 employees; the only system that has the repressive powers to legally interfere with human rights. And let’s not forget that a police officer can also legally use a firearm, and in this respect, because of the possible consequence – the death of a person – he or she has more powers, which he or she can implement in a second or two, than all prosecutors and all the courts have. Therefore, the police as a system really must be managed effectively, and in general, monitored as effectively as possible, so that it does not use its powers in the sense of unlawfully interfering with human rights. It must use its repressive powers to guarantee human rights for all citizens. And there are a lot of us, and the police, in all respects, use their repressive powers to deal with only a small minority of those individuals who break the law.
However, during the term of the current government, I have noticed that the situation in the police is becoming more critical by the day, and has now reached its lowest point. The situation is much worse than we think. The reason for this is the weak political leadership of the Ministry of the Interior and the complete absence of real leadership of the police, and because of both of these reasons, the police system is slowly but steadily disintegrating. The system is still sort of functioning, but only at a purely local level, so most people do not feel the gravity of the situation. Let me back up this statement with some data.
The new Minister and the new Director-General of the Police
With every government, the police get a new (or old) Minister of the Interior, but he or she has limited influence on the work of the police, because the police is a constituent body of which the Director-General of the Police is the absolute head and leader in all respects. The selection of the Minister of the Interior is in the hands of every new Prime Minister. However, the ministerial role is perhaps less important for the work of the police than that of the Director-General of the Police. For at least a few mandates now, we have been used to the police getting a new Director-General at the first cabinet meeting, and there is nothing wrong with that. However, it is not absolutely necessary. By law, he or she is a career police officer, which is the usual practice in the vast majority of European countries. However, there are many career police officers who meet the legal conditions, which include 15 years of service in the police and 8 years of experience in managerial positions.
And that is where things went wrong at the very beginning of this mandate. When Prime Minister Robert Golob was not satisfied with Boštjan Lindav as acting Director-General of the Police, Senad Jušić was chosen for the post. Let’s leave aside the personal acquaintance of Jušić’s brother (also a police officer) with Golob, which was reported in the media; Interior Minister Boštjan Poklukar did not even know him, but he chose him and proposed him to the government for the appointment. Of course, this happened at Golob’s request. Many pointed out at the time that Jušić did not meet the legal conditions for appointment (8 years of experience in managerial positions), which was recently confirmed by the Administrative Court. Due to these circumstances, the police, therefore, have an illegally appointed Director-General of the Police, and any citizen can accuse any police officer in any police procedure of having an illegally appointed Director-General. This is what is happening in practice, and it is, of course, an obstacle to the work of police officers, even though they have nothing to do with who their Director-General is. With all due respect to Jušić, he may have been an excellent police officer, criminal detective or supervisor in the police, but it is clear for everyone to see that he is an extremely weak leader who simply does not run the police at all. This should not be seen as a criticism of him, but instead, as criticism of Golob and Poklukar. We can only blame Jušić for his naivety in trying to fill the shoes that are much too big for him. The consequence of the absence of police leadership is the disintegration of effective and legitimate police work, which I will write about below.
It started with Golob’s security
Today, Golob is vehemently explaining how he has arranged his own security in the same way as Dr Janez Drnovšek, and that his security is now guaranteed, and that there is no leaking of information from his office at all. This is, of course, a pure lie, and it is not one of the typical Golob lies, as he probably actually believes this claim, because he has been told so by his sources at the police.
Every Prime Minister, every Interior Minister, and even every Director-General of the Police, when he or she takes office, tries to connect with individuals from the police, and there are even more ex-police officers who were dissatisfied with the fact that they were not promoted in the police or were dismissed from the police, but all of them try to “advise” them “as best they can”. This is what happened to me when I became the Minister of the Interior. From the severely accusatory anonymous comments against certain individuals, including my own security personnel, to pointing out how poorly the security police were protecting me, and so on. The question, of course, is to what extent the aforementioned protected persons fall for these comments and to what extent they do not. Golob is certainly one of those who completely fell for such whisperers and believed them – indeed, he still believes them today.
Miloš Njegoslav Milović was probably not the only one of these “advisors” to Golob. It is quite clear, however, that these people convinced Golob of the need for his own security service, probably also by means of material evidence, which, at the time, was a picture of his underage son in Brussels. Golob probably still does not know the fact that the picture in question was likely taken by the very same people who advised him to get his own security. Drnovšek, on the other hand, never had his security service organised in such a manner, nor did Milan Kučan, who had only one adviser, a former police inspector. But Golob does not know this today, so he is unwittingly lying when he compares his security service with Drnovšek’s.
Golob’s security service (police officers working in the General Secretariat of the Government) is, in fact, a kind of cancer on the police and its services, because these police officers are subordinate to Golob and not to the Director-General of the Police. The Director-General of the Police, therefore, has no influence on the work of Golob’s security details, but he is also responsible for Golob’s security by law. The relevant information for Golob’s security is, of course, in the possession of the police, but the question is to what extent this information reaches Golob’s security guards, who are not part of the police. Golob is not aware of this. An absurdity that rightly led to the resistance of the former Director-General of the Police, Boštjan Lindav, and the former Minister of the Interior, Tatjana Bobnar. Unfortunately, they have already been dismissed.
Cleaning up the “Janšaists”, paying back fines, pressing charges against the police leaders
I believe that there are many individuals who applauded Golob when he, in one way or another, ordered Interior Minister Bobnar to purge the so-called “Janšaists” – supporters of Janez Janša – from the police. But in reality, at this point, Golob had already flagrantly violated Article 22 of the Constitution of the Republic of Slovenia (equal protection of rights) at that point, because of which he should have, of course, said goodbye to the post of Prime Minister. This is especially true because of him ordering that Egon Govekar, Director of the Nova Gorica Police Directorate, and Martin Jazbec, Director of the Police Specialist Administration, should lose their jobs. Martin Jazbec is the man who allegedly legally dismissed Miloš Njegoslav Milović from the police. To what extent Lindav and Bobnar resisted this is another question. The public perception today is that they resisted Golob’s orders. I do not believe this myself, and the proof of my doubt is the 15 or so criminal charges that were brought against 15 senior police officials (allegedly “Janšaists”) during their time, who were in charge, particularly in Ljubljana, of providing security at the violent left-wing protests, especially between the 3rd and the 5th of October 2021, when the meeting of the European Union and Western Balkan prime ministers took place in Ljubljana and Brdo.
Golob’s views and orders to purge the “Janšaists” from the police, the repayment of the fines to the violent protesters, and pressing criminal charges against police chiefs who were doing their job legally (no one has been convicted, at least not yet) send a devastating message to all police chiefs and all police officers in Slovenia. The one most responsible for this is, of course, Golob, but Interior Minister Poklukar and Director-General of the Police Jušić are also to blame.
And the devastating message that is being communicated to police chiefs and officers has devastating and practical consequences on the ground. Some of them are visible today, and others are (still) hidden from the public – for now. The poor action of police officers when it comes to the Roma issue is definitely a consequence of all of the above. Police officers and their leaders must surely be deciding between legitimate action and whether to step back, take no action or look the other way. Often, they no longer know what is right and what is wrong (paying back fines), they are afraid of sanctions and the consequences are there in the form of inaction or bad action.
The recent retreat or, if you like, what was almost a flight of police officers from thugs in one of Ljubljana’s public garages, or the inaction of police officers at the recent celebrations of Albanians in Ljubljana, can be attributed to the same reasons. Why, then, should police officers and their leaders expose themselves, endanger their lives, the material existence of their families, etc., when they know that even if they are doing their job legally, no one will stand up for them, defend them or protect them legally? This is the disintegration of a system of effective and legitimate policing.
The ineffective management of the police system is apparently also spreading from the national level to the lower levels. The proof of this is the latest case in Nova Gorica, where, according to media reports, a senior police officer has been literally harassing, abusing and threatening his junior colleagues for a decade and more, and has the same attitude towards citizens. Despite the fact that he has allegedly been convicted of such conduct, he is still a police officer who poses an internal security risk for the police. This, of course, raises the question of where police leaders are and what they are doing at the local, regional and national level. Apparently, at least in this case, they are doing nothing, and they are even being paid for it.
The falling number of police officers
Today, we often hear that there are not enough police officers in Slovenia. We are somehow used to this, because I do not know of any professional group that would publicly claim that there are too many of them. So, let’s look at the numbers. Before independence, Slovenia had around 6,700 police officers. That is the number we came into the independent state with. In 2004, we made a written promise to Brussels that Slovenia would have just over 10,000 police officers when it joined Schengen in 2007. However, we never reached that figure. In 2012, during the second Janša government, when we were in the worst economic crisis and money was running out everywhere, the number of police officers was not reduced. The number of police officers remained the same as it was in the previous mandate – around 8,500.
Today, when there is more than enough money in the state coffers, the government boasts that the number of staff in ministries and constituent bodies has remained almost the same as it was at the beginning of its mandate, or even lower. They hide the fact that they have increased the number of employees by around 700, but only the number of police officers is lower by about 600 than it was in 2022. There are also fewer judicial police officers and customs officers, and the authorities have not published the number of soldiers in a long time. I headed the Ministry of the Interior’s human resources department with the police for several years and no one can convince me that the number of police officers cannot be increased or at least kept at the same level as it was before. Instead, I believe that Golob, Poklukar and Jušić are deliberately reducing the number of police officers, who are often overworked. The result is the accelerated disintegration of the police system.
The Security and Protection Centre is just the tip of the iceberg
The situation at the Security and Protection Centre is just the tip of the iceberg, which happens to be clear to the public these days. It is a specialised service, set up immediately after Slovenia’s independence, which deals with the protection of protected persons. There is no reason not to believe the testimony of the prosecutor, Mateja Gončin, who spoke of numerous irregularities, abuses and even deliberate crimes committed by security officers and, in particular, by the management of the aforementioned centre. What is more, she even has, as she stated, material evidence to back up her claims.
Her public appearance is clearly an expression of her distress; the police have, and were supposed to once again, be protecting her because of the prosecutorial duties she is carrying out. She brought all this to the attention of both the Minister of the Interior, Poklukar, and the Director-General of the Police, Jušić, more than a year ago, but nothing has happened. What is more, instead of investigating her allegations effectively and quickly, the Minister’s supervisors pointed the finger in their findings at the allegedly quite intimate relations between the prosecutor and her security officers. How disgusting – it was as if they wanted to break up her whole family.
Irregularities, abuses and crimes have occurred and are likely to continue. Instead of a swift and effective reaction by the Minister of the Interior, Poklukar, and the Director-General of the Police, Jušić, who were informed of her allegations more than a year ago and even received a report from the supervisors almost half a year ago, which to some extent confirmed the allegations made by the prosecutor, they continue to mock her and all of us after her public appearance with platitudes about the good work of the police and the supposedly very safe country that the police assures us with its work.
The absence of leadership and the interference of Golob in the police
The absence of serious and responsible police leadership from the very top of the police, which we are witnessing at every turn, is also resulting in the erosion of entire subsystems of the police; this is particularly true of the National Bureau of Investigation (NPU), which Golob himself interfered in at the very beginning of this mandate. It is no secret that Golob himself placed Darko Muženič at the head of this most important service for the prosecution of the most serious forms of crime.
Let me remind you that Muženič was under the scrutiny of criminal investigators and prosecutors at the time, and after Golob’s intervention with the prosecutors, all proceedings against him were dropped, and his path to the head of the National Bureau of Investigation was opened. However, since it is this office that should also be dealing with criminal suspicions against Globo himself, his appointment is a guarantee that nothing will happen to Golob. Muženič is there precisely for this reason. Let me remind you: Golob’s “stolen identity” in Romania and the pile of money in his account there, the money transfers to the journalist Vesna Vuković for unknown favours, the Balkan money business, all while Golob was at the helm of the Gen-I energy company, will have to wait for a different time to be investigated – and that is Muženič’s guarantee. Of course, all criminal investigators know this, and therefore, this is an additional demotivating factor for them. And besides, intrigue, unauthorised stockpiling of information on selected individuals, including politicians, threats and blackmail at the very top of the police force are present on a daily basis, and this is something scary and dangerous. Some may say that I am wrong, that, after all, the police have brought criminal charges against Golob himself. This fact does not in any way change what I have written so far – instead, the criminal complaint against Golob is the result of the work of the criminal investigators at the regional level in Ljubljana, and it can be described as the inattention of Darko Muženič and the Director-General of Police himself, Jušić, who were allegedly not informed about this at all, and thus failed to meet Golob’s expectations.
Police officers are told not to obey the law
Over the past year, police officers dealing with illegal migrants have been negatively surprised by being told not to obey the law. I have no evidence that these are written instructions, but they are apparently at least verbal, which, in practice, has the same effect.
When police officers detain a person who has entered the country illegally, they are obliged under EU asylum law, our law and international agreements to examine all the circumstances of such an act and can and must refuse the person entry to the country if there are legitimate grounds for doing so, as agreed also by international agreements. This is particularly true of Croatia or Hungary, which are EU and Schengen members, and are safe countries in general. If the factual situation is such that it is indisputable that a person has entered Slovenia illegally and it is demonstrable that he or she has come from one of these countries, the police can and must return that person to that country. However, this is clearly no longer the case in practice. Such checks on illegal migrants entering Slovenia are apparently a thing of the past, as police officers tell me that there are no longer any such checks, but they have instead become taxi drivers who transport illegal migrants to the asylum centre in Ljubljana at the expense of the state.
The practice of dealing with the illegal migrants who leave the asylum centre also seems to have changed. The statistics are clear: in 2024, the police apprehended around 45,000 migrants who had entered Slovenia illegally. As a rule, they apply for international protection or asylum and are accommodated in an asylum centre. Of course, not all 45,000 asylum seekers are there, but at most, a few 100 – most of them leave the asylum centre and head towards Austria or Italy. In this case, too, the police officers have told me that there have been changes in the way in which they are treated in the past year. If they are caught by the police on their way to Austria or Italy, they apparently now have to offer them the opportunity to reapply for asylum or international protection, after which they are rehoused in an asylum centre, which, of course, they have not done in the past.
Such, probably verbal, instructions to police officers are, of course, a deviation from the implementation of the laws on illegal migration, but they also have a demotivating effect on the work of the police officers, because, of course, the police officers know what the law is like in this area, and what the international agreements are in this area, but they have to do things differently. Of course, it is clear that they are wondering how it is possible that someone is literally preventing them from working in accordance with the law, which is also contributing to the disintegration of the police system.
Negative selection in terms of staffing in the police
The disintegration of the police system is, of course, caused by a number of factors. One of the most important reasons is the so-called negative selection of police personnel and the failure to retire police chiefs when they reach retirement eligibility. When I speak of negative personnel selection, the situation is a bit like the judicial
system in that the less capable and less educated employees are the ones who get promoted. The joke that a policeman and a police dog are walking down the road and that together, they have a high school education, no longer applies. Today, the situation is reversed. Today, there are some 400 employees with Master’s degrees walking the roads, carrying out elementary police tasks, such as intervening in minor violations, regulating traffic and so on. They have little chance of promotion. The police force also has over 40 employees with PhDs, but they do not, as a rule, occupy the highest positions in the police force. Management and leadership positions are often occupied by individuals with lower levels of education who have long since fulfilled the conditions for retirement, but who nevertheless persist in these positions because the law allows them to do so. In the previous mandate, we wrote into the law that such an extension of service was possible only if both the employee and the employer agreed to it, but this provision was annulled by the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Slovenia. This, too, is corroding the police system and causing it to disintegrate.
But it is, first and foremost, Prime Minister Golob himself who is to blame for the situation, as he has interfered too often in the work of the police through reckless moves. Interior Minister Poklukar is, of course, also responsible, and, of course, the Director-General of the Police, Jušić, as well, who is not actually leading the police. However, Golob’s responsibility is even greater, because his statements have violated not only the Constitution of the Republic of Slovenia (persecuting the “Janšaists”), but also the law, not to mention the way in which he has directly linked the police to the criminal underworld. Such assessments of the work of the police from the highest level of the executive branch of power are humiliating and demotivating for all police officers and criminal investigators, and, of course, they contribute significantly to the accelerated disintegration of the police system.
In place of a conclusion
Overall, we can therefore conclude that the police system is in serious decay and is at its lowest point since 1990. The responsibility for this lies primarily with Prime Minister Robert Golob, Interior Minister Boštjan Poklukar and, of course, the Director-General of the Police, Senad Jušić.
Some may believe that I am exaggerating in what I am writing, and some may say that centre-right governments have been the same towards the police. But none of this is true. I am prepared to confront such individuals and their views publicly at any time and to exchange arguments.
My intention was and is quite simple and sincere. I did not intend to offend or frighten anyone with this writing, but I feel obliged to share what I know and perceive with the public. As a long-serving police officer, police chief, Minister of the Interior, politician, and citizen in general, I am aware of the role and importance of the police in a well-organised country. I co-designed the police organisation between the years 1990 and 1999, and the first modern police law was drafted in my office in 1998, so I cannot stay indifferent when I see the police system disintegrating. I can say with confidence that since 1990, the police have never been at such a low point. My only wish is that the police would only go up from here. That is what all citizens who want to live in real security deserve.
Dr Vinko Gorenak
