The police covered the detentions with a flag – Picture of the day – Kommersant

On Russian Flag Day, the police detained at least 33 people in the metropolitan metro, according to the human rights project OVD-Info (included in the register of foreign agents). Exactly the same detentions took place earlier on other public holidays – May 9 and June 12. The Ministry of Internal Affairs does not comment on the situation, but the police officers informed the lawyers about the conduct of a “special preventive operation”. And some detainees were informally told that the city’s facial recognition system considers them potential offenders.

On the evening of Monday, August 22, Muscovite Alexander Zharov was returning home. He entered the subway, went down to the Dobryninskaya station – and was immediately detained by two policemen with the wording “You are wanted.” “They had my photos on their phone. One was just taken by a camera in the subway, the other was taken in March at the police department after being detained at a rally (against the military operation in Ukraine.— “b”), – said Mr. Zharov. – The police called the squad, and after about 40 minutes I was taken to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the Zamoskvorechye district.

While waiting for the order, the policemen talked about the Sphere system, a Muscovite recalls. They explained: when a person from a “special database” passes on the subway, the surveillance camera “takes a picture” of him and “transmits this picture”. “Then the police receive a signal from the situation center, and they must respond,” said Alexander Zharov.

We are talking about the Moscow system of face recognition in the subway.

As reported by the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Moscow, in 2020 “Sphere” helped to solve more than 5 thousand crimes, and by the middle of 2021 “learned” more than 2.2 thousand people.

More up-to-date data of the Ministry of Internal Affairs has not yet been published. At the beginning of 2021, a series of rallies were held in Russia in support of the politician Alexei Navalny, after which the Sphere was used to search for protesters. After identifying people by CCTV cameras, they were visited at the registration address, where they were detained or issued warnings.

And in 2022, the “Sphere” began to be used for “prevention”. On public holidays, people from the database are detained in the subway and isolated for several hours in police departments, then released without protocol. “Kommersant” previously reported about such cases on May 9 (50 people were detained) and June 12 (43 detentions are known). “I was detained on May 9 and June 12, but I forgot that August 22 is also a holiday – Flag Day,” says Alexander Zharov. By the time he was taken to the department, the OVD-Info project counted 29 arrests in Moscow, later this figure increased to 33.

It was by honoring the flag of the Russian Federation – or rather, by conducting a “special preventive operation” Flag Day “” – that the police explained their actions on Monday, lawyer Leysan Mannapova told Kommersant.

“This special operation, as they explained to me, is a wanted list for people from the Sphere base. Those who were then allegedly checked in the departments to see if their fines for rallies were paid and whether their arrests were served,” the lawyer says, referring to the explanations of the police officers in the Meshchansky district.

At the same time, lawyers were often not allowed into the police department to see the detainees. “They said that there are no such people in the department. Or that they have orders not to let the defender in. Or they even said that the inspectors were investigating the reason for the detention, and before that it was impossible to get to the trustees,” says Ms. Mannapova. On Monday, she went to the detainees in several police departments: “Every time I wrote applications for inadmissibility.” Now, each of them must pass an internal check.

Employees of the Kitai-Gorod OP specially issued protocols for the detainees to be brought to the department – as a “pass” for further movement in the subway, the lawyer says. When re-arrested, a person had to present such a protocol – as proof that he had already been “checked”. But in some cases the mechanism did not work. So, Muscovite Zlata Evropeytseva spent two hours in the Kitai-Gorod OP. After that, she was detained again and taken to the Fili-Davydkovo police station, where she had to sit for five hours. “The first detention concerned the “check of involvement in violations” – it is not clear which ones. The second was not explained at all, – says the lawyer. – Zlata wrote complaints addressed to the heads of departments and intends to demand compensation of moral compensation in the amount of 500 thousand rubles through the court. After all, she had to lose a whole day.

The Fili-Davydkovo police department, according to the lawyer, distinguished itself on Monday by Major Olga Azarova’s “principledness”. Three detainees – Zlata Evropeytseva and two other men – were released by Ms. Azarova from the department late at night, explaining, according to the lawyer, that “they were not detained at all, they could have left.” “Before that, they were not explained the reasons for the detention, and for several hours at the checkpoint no one explained the reasons for the non-admission. The employees only talked about Azarova’s order, and that’s all, – says the lawyer. – Civilians were allowed into the department to write statements, but they took out the application form for non-admission to me on the street. When they released Zlata, Major Azarova said that my other two principals were not in the department. Although they were inside, and we were in touch with them.”

The lawyer explains this behavior of the police by their own “total misunderstanding” of the situation. According to Leysan Mannapova, neither the employees in the metro nor the inspectors on duty in the departments know why they carry out “preventive special operations” – and what is their meaning in general.

“People were in Fili-Davydkovo for so long because the inspector could not get through to the authorities at night and get instructions on what to do with the detainees,” the lawyer is sure.

She notes that in all police departments, detainees were forced to write explanations – but they did not explain what exactly needed to be “explained”. As a rule, people reported there that they had already paid fines or had served their arrests for detentions at rallies – or they wrote briefly: “Article 51 of the Constitution.” Recall that this provision of the Basic Law secures the right of a Russian citizen “not to testify against himself, his spouse and close relatives.” It is not necessary to write such explanations in such cases, but people are often not released without them, the lawyer says.

Both in June and August, Kommersant sent requests to the Ministry of Internal Affairs with a request to comment on the detentions during the holidays – but the department did not respond. The press service of the metro told Kommersant in June: “Law enforcement agencies have access to the Sphere system. We have nothing to do with the formation of the database. We just provide the infrastructure to use the system.”

Commenting on such detentions earlier, OVD-Info lawyers explained that citizens have two options for protecting their rights – a complaint addressed to the head of the department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the district and the court.

At the moment, Kommersant is aware of the preparation of at least three lawsuits against the Ministry of Internal Affairs after the arrests on August 22.

It should be noted that the Ministry of Internal Affairs has already had to make an official apology to Yabloko activist Nikolai Kavkazsky, who was detained on May 9. Then Andrei Babushkin, a member of the Presidential Council for Human Rights, intervened in the situation with mass detentions in the subway. He prepared a complaint to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but did not have time to wait for an answer, as suddenly died May 14. However, the answer was still there: in a letter from the deputy head of the operational department of the police for the Eastern District of Moscow, Oleg Arefiev, it was reported that all the “facts indicated in the appeals” of Mr. Babushkin were “confirmed”, for which “the official was brought to “Apologizes.”

Recall that the police can hold a person in the department for no longer than three hours – then they will have to name the reasons for the detention. People detained for more than three hours and who consider the actions of the police illegal can count on compensation for non-pecuniary damage. As a rule, it is prescribed extremely rarely and averages 5-10 thousand rubles. In 2021, State Duma deputies from United Russia offered appoint compensation for non-pecuniary damage in case of illegal detentions. The amount of compensation, as conceived by the authors, was to be calculated from the “losses incurred during the detention” – for example, in wages. But at the moment nothing is known about the fate of the bill.

Maria Starikova