Georgia Fired Its Corrupt Police

After the 2003 Rose Revolution, the Republic of Georgia treated corruption as a national emergency and earned praise from Transparency International as "the best corruption-buster in the world." In 2004, Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili's government dissolved the corrupt traffic police and quickly fired 16,000 officers, while also broadcasting arrests of senior officials to show the crackdown was serious. The reforms raised salaries for young, often Western-educated public servants, centralized parts of education, reduced petty bribery, and created the Anti-Corruption Interagency Council in 2008. Since then, low-level corruption has fallen sharply, though later reports warned that high-level and clientelistic corruption remained a problem.

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