Official statistics publicized on Monday by the chief of the national police service, Aram Hovannisian, also shows a 6.3 percent year-on-year increase in the number of all vehicle accidents.
Hovannisian and other senior officials from the Armenian Ministry of Interior said that a key reason for the increased number of fatalities and other traffic violations is that the Patrol Service was only recently expanded to all regions of Armenia. They expressed confidence that the new police force will reverse the upward trend this year.
The Patrol Service was set up in 2021 with financial and technical assistance provided by the United States and the European Union. It was meant to introduce Western standards in road policing, street patrol and crowd control.
Critics regularly accuse newly trained officers of the Patrol Service of incompetence. The first chief of the Patrol Service, Artur Umrshatian, was sacked in February 2023 after his subordinates took more than 20 minutes to stop a car racing chaotically through Yerevan’s main square.
Lenient and inconsistent road policing seems to be another factor. In particular, anecdotal evidence suggests that most Armenian motorists have stopped fastening their seat belts over the past few years. Few of them are fined for such violations.
Nevertheless, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and other Armenian officials regularly portray the Patrol Service as a successful example of police reforms carried out by the current authorities in Yerevan.
Deputy Interior Minister Arpine Sargsian on Monday listed the creation of the service among “big achievements” of those reforms. The mostly structural changes have already produced “quite serious results,” she told a joint news conference with Interior Minister Vahe Ghazarian and Hovannisian.
During the 2018 “velvet revolution” that brought him to power, Pashinian repeatedly lambasted Armenia’s former government for aggressively enforcing traffic rules with fines. His government forgave thousands of car owners that had refused to pay such fines and also reduced most of the legal penalties for traffic violations. But it toughened some of them after traffic deaths surged from 279 in 2017 to 343 in 2018.
Armenia’s overall crime rate has also increased since 2018. The police recorded 35,052 various crimes in January-November 2023, up by 5.3 percent year on year. The increase was primarily driven by drug trafficking cases which more than doubled in the eleven-month period.
The rapid rise in such cases observed in recent years is widely blamed on increasingly accessible synthetic drugs mainly sold through the internet. It has prompted serious concern from not only opposition politicians but also parliament deputies from Pashinian’s Civil Contract party. Meeting with those lawmakers last October, Ghazarian called for criminalizing drug addiction in the country.