Turkey's police body-searched one tenth of the national population in 2019

Turkish police's side-organization "Reinforcements" conducted nearly nine million body searches in 2019, an activity report by Turkey's General Directorate of Security Affairs revealed. The Reinforcements Directorate conducted 8,944,100 body searches in 2019, the report said, and some 1,171,188 security investigations and archive searches were carried out.

Monday March 09 2020 05:46 pm

Duvar English

Almost nine million people were body-searched by a side-organization of the Turkish police in 2019, Turkey's General Directorate of Security Affairs said in their 2019 Activity Report.

The 2018-founded Reinforcements Directorate of the Turkish police made 8,944,100 body searches in 2019, along with some 1,171,188 security investigations and archive searches, the report said.

The Security Supervision Department, a subsidiary of the Directorate of Security Affairs, also conducted a total of 2,280 investigations into Directorate members.

The number of police officers in Turkey increased by about 20,000 in 2019, reaching a total of 261,648.

Only seven percent of Turkey's police officers are women, a total of 15,315.

846 meetings, protests banned

The report noted a 0.7% rate of police intervention in meetings and protests, a drop from the rate of 3.2% in 2015.

Some 846 out of 51,525 meetings and protests were found to be unlawful in 2019, with some 339 seeing police intervention.

A total of 4,116 people at 390 gatherings were the target of administrative action.

Number of "watchmen" nearly double

The total staff of the Directorate of Security affairs increased by 30,000 in 2019, reaching 307,813.

Meanwhile the number of "watchmen," the pseudo-police officers whose authority has been widely expanded in recent years, have nearly doubled in number.

There are now 21,319 "watchmen" in Turkey, up from 11,398 in 2018.