‘Call 100. We don’t make arrests’
Kathimerini looks at how the Hellenic Police deals with cases of domestic violence
“I had hoped Georgia would be the last,” says Maria Poutou. Her 43-year-old sister called their mother asking for help one night last December, after a beating from her 71-year-old partner that left her with a fractured leg. Her mother called the local police precinct on the Saronic island of Salamina requesting that a squad car be sent to her daughter’s house. The officer on duty said there were none available. “Bring her over yourself so she can press charges,” he advised. When she got her injured daughter and autistic grandson safely to the police station, the duty officer asked that she bring them upstairs. When she said that was impossible, he advised that she take the 43-year-old to the health center first and then come back. “He didn’t want to deal with it on his shift,” says Poutou.
They returned to the police station the next day. The officers on duty at the time installed a panic button on the 43-year-old’s cellphone, which she could use to alert the police in a similar emergency, and issued a search warrant for the victim’s partner. “They didn’t look for him at once. The neighbors saw him coming and going. They would have caught him if they’d taken the incident seriously enough.” A few days later, the 71-year-old turned up outside Georgia’s mother’s house with a shotgun. “My sister couldn’t run. He killed her,” says Poutou.
An administrative inquiry was ordered into the police’s handling of the incident. The family still has not been informed of its findings.
An inquiry is also being carried out into the police’s response in last week’s murder of 28-year-old Kyriaki Griva, who was stabbed to death by her ex-partner right in front of the guard post outside the Agioi Anargyroi police station in northern Athens. As in the previous case, the police failed to assess the seriousness of the situation.
Speaking to Kathimerini, a high-ranking official at the Citizen Protection Ministry concedes that what went wrong and what kind of training the officers involved had needs to be investigated thoroughly, and new procedures introduced.
‘They wanted a psychologist present not because it is part of the proper procedure, but because they thought the woman could be lying’
Some efforts have been made in the past few years to educate police officers on handling domestic violence cases. However, speaking with lawyers with first-hand experience of such cases, Kathimerini has found serious shortcomings in the system. For one, protocols are not uniform, which means that each case is treated differently at every police station.
In June 2020, the Athens First Instance Prosecutor’s Office sent a three-page document to police headquarters with guidelines on how to manage such cases. One of the guidelines in the handbook stresses that victims should not be dissuaded from filing formal complaints.
In August 2021, a similar handbook was distributed within the Hellenic Police force. Among other things, it noted that citizens can take recourse to their local police precinct but it does not explain how they should be safely transported there and back. Spotting the oversight after last Monday’s murder in Agioi Anargyroi, the ministry on Friday added instructions on keeping complainants safe until the threat has been dealt with or passed.
Lawyer Clio Papapantoleon describes two incidents of unacceptable police behavior she dealt with in as many years. “Both cases concern violent former partners who continued to stalk and threaten the women,” she tells Kathimerini. They’d send threatening messages, make calls in the middle of the night and one of the men even stalked his ex’s child at school. The women sought help at their local police stations, located in different parts of Athens.
“Both went with the request, ‘Get him.’ The answer they received was: ‘Call 100; we don’t make arrests.’ Their complaints weren’t vague; they were backed by evidence, by new threat messages,” says Papapantoleon, referring to the 100 emergency police dispatch number. “The police don’t feel that these situations are an emergency and that the perpetrator may be frightened off if he sees an immediate response from the police.”
Another lawyer describes a more recent incident, in mid-March, which involved a woman who filed a stalking complaint at an Attica precinct and was dismissed because she had filed numerous similar complaints against the same man in the past. He attacked her five days later. She filed a suit against him and he was sentenced to 12 months for domestic bodily harm and was released on parole.
Lawyers working with the Diotima Center, an NGO specializing in issues of gender and equality, have more such incidents to report. Like one woman who wanted to file a sexual harassment complaint and was told by the officer on duty: “Are you sure? Maybe he regrets it.” Or another who was beaten but was not given adequate instructions on what to do until she reached out to Diotima and took her case to a different police precinct, which proceeded with her attacker’s arrest.
Marina Farmakidi, one of the organization’s lawyers, recalls a recent case where a duty officer dismissed a rape charge because it had happened a few days earlier. He said that the victim’s statement could not be taken without a psychologist being present; they’re still waiting for the appointment to be arranged.
“They wanted a psychologist present not because it is part of the proper procedure, but because they thought the woman could be lying, even though that is none of their business,” says Farmakidi. “It just goes to show the skepticism toward complaints.”
