Foreigners often view the Cambodian police with a mixture of fear and distrust. They often turn to their embassy when they have a problem. But the Cambodian police are human too, and when in Cambodian territory we live under Cambodian law.
In fact, the police can actually help more than the embassy in many cases.
Yes, there is what Westerners call corruption. Cambodians often see it as remuneration - most police are awarded a basic salary of around $30 per month and use their own phones and their own petrol to conduct investigations.
In some cases, Westerners have actually introduced the corruption. After the UN, in its wisdom, proclaimed a coalition government in 1993, someone who had either never met a Cambodian or alternatively knew them all too well decreed the coalition partners should be equally represented in the police force.
Hundreds of members of the new coalition police quota took advantage of their call to duty by selling their names - literally and promptly. The guy you spend all day addressing as Captain Ravy may well clock out and go home to a wife who knows him as Rattanak, a former tax collector from Takeo who happened to have some loose change in his pocket when uniforms were up for grabs.
There are frequent reports of foreigners in methamphetamine-heavy holiday hideaways being charged $100 or more for a police report for the insurance company. To play devil's advocate, Cambodian police are anything but silly - if they have met a lot of foreigners, they are familiar with the concept on insurance fraud. To his Cambodian policeman's mind, if you are asking for a letter for insurance but not filing a complaint, you are probably claiming that Nikon that you actually sold to a guy at the guesthouse, and he is just taking his cut.
And then there is the foreign misunderstanding of what Cambodians would see as the Buddhist Middle Path. Live and let live. For instance, you can kill yourself with drugs - that is your right, as far as they see it, but if you sell drugs to other people, that is a crime against another being and therefore worth their time and energy.
"There is nothing wrong with drunk driving - it is what you do while you are driving drunk that might be illegal," an officer told me recently in another example of their thinking. Zen and the art of Cambodian Policing!
So given how cryptic these guys can be, an explanation of the Cambodian police mind is in order. They are idiosyncratic beings, but contrary to the cynical view of many expatriates (and some very vocal non-government organizations), they take crimes, especially committed against or by foreigners seriously, and except for bad apples you find in any police force, the majority adhere to the same values as good people in any society - harming children is wrong, crimes such as rape and kidnap are abhorrent, and men who beat women are not men, for instance. They just approach crime solving in a different way.
"A crime against a guest in Cambodia is an offense to the country's honor," another officer explained recently.
The Phnom Penh Police Department is divided into local police, district police, and municipal police. There are two bureaus of Foreigner Police - one under municipal, where complaints can still be filed around the corner from the Heart of Darkness on Street 51, and Ministry of Interior, located at 62 Monivong Boulevard, almost directly opposite the Thai Embassy. Interior takes care of problems in all corners of the country.
You are unlikely to find someone who speaks English at the Sangkat, but police advise you report serious crimes to the nearest station first. At the Khan, you will probably find someone who speaks English, and almost certainly French or Russian. There are seven Khans in Phnom Penh - Chamcarmon covers most of NGO land, for instance, and Daun Penh covers the river area.
To make someone understand to take you to a police station is easy - Cambodians pronounce police as "polee" and understand the French for station, poste, so just ask for "polee poste".
Cambodian police work on a Communist system. Any officer worth his salt has trained in Vietnam, and many spent years in countries such as Bulgaria, Russia and East Germany during the Cold War. They should not be underestimated.
If you see a protest or an event being monitored and count 20 uniforms, there will be at least that many plain clothes officers in the crowd. They may be motor bike taxi drivers, they may be shop owners. They are called D-Bey in Khmer - a corruption of the French abbreviation for secret police. Each D-Bey will also have a network of informants he or she can call on when they want to conduct an investigation.