If you haven’t already made the acquaitance of Michael Totten, then you should. Totten is an itinerant blogger who seems to wander around the Middle East on a semi-permanent basis, chatting to people and making YouTube videos. He’s financed in this fascinating endeavour by a small army of readers who donate through PayPal.
The results of his travels are often gripping, as in a recent post when he’s interviewing the police chief in Kirkuk in his office just as a suspect is brought in for questioning (a friend riding on a motorbike that the suspect was driving decided to start shooting into a crowd of people). Totten reaches for his video camera and starts taping on the spot…
P.S. Charlie Edwards, who runs Demos’s security program, has a story about a friend who was responsible for policing in Basra shortly after the invasion of Iraq. Early on in his tour, the Coalition Provisional Authority contracted out police training to private contractors, of whom he was one. In order to prove that they were being effective, they were told to define a range of Key Performance Indicators.
The British agonized over the complexities of policing and attempted to come up with a rough guide as to how they were doing. Meanwhile American contractors responded immediately: the police station should still have
all the chairs it was issued with; all the tables, all the guns, and all the padlocks; and no bullet holes in the external walls.
Which, when you stop to think about it, are actually pretty robust as indicators go…
