More Police Won’t Solve Haiti’s Crisis

When Moïse was assassinated in July 2021, the international community backed Ariel Henry to become prime minister, despite concerns about Henry’s relationship with a key suspect in the assassination. Unelected and unpopular, Henry lacks the will to rein in gangs—and at least one gang leader, Vitelhomme Innocent, has boasted about his ties to Henry. (Henry has not addressed the allegations.)

Under Henry, gang violence has terrorized and paralyzed the country, making it less safe and less governable. Haiti is also poorer and more hungry—nearly half of Haitians lack access to sufficient food. The United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti reported a doubling in gang killings, attacks, and kidnappings in the first three months of 2023 compared with the previous year. In that period, at least 846 people were killed and 395 kidnapped.

But this spring, Haitians in communities across the country fought back to defend their neighborhoods. Some have unleashed their rage in horrific lynchings, and at least 160 suspected gang members have been killed. Many more Haitians barricaded their neighborhoods to prevent gang members’ entry and, as I have personally witnessed, worked with police to keep impromptu checkpoints calm. This civilian engagement shifted the terms of Haiti’s crisis: For the first time since Moïse’s assassination, kidnappings and gang assaults all but stopped. Many gangs went quiet, and their reign of terror lifted.

In theory, this would have been an opening for the police to stamp out gangs. But instead, the gangs regained their footing over the past month and the kidnappings and killings have resumed. The police cannot make significant inroads against gangs absent a broader political breakthrough. In Haiti, gang members are not independent warlords operating apart from the state. They are part of the way the state functions—and how political leaders assert power.

A police officer prevents protesters from entering a hotel during a protest against Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry calling for his resignation in Port-au-Prince on Oct. 10, 2022. Richard Pierrin/AFP via Getty Images

The list of Haitians sanctioned by the United States and Canada for their connections with arms and drug trafficking, gang patronage, and corruption include some of Henry’s closest political associates: Martelly, who launched Henry’s political career; former Henry government ministers Berto Dorcé and Liszt Quitel; four senators who served alongside Henry; and three of the country’s most powerful business leaders.

The rot in politics directly impacts the Haitian National Police, which serves municipalities throughout Haiti as the country’s only police department. The authority that oversees the police force, the National Superior Council, consists of the prime minister, the interior and justice ministers, the police chief, and the police inspector-general. Henry’s recent ministers of justice and the interior, Dorcé and Quitel, respectively, left their jobs and council positions in November 2022 after their visas were withdrawn by the U.S. government. They were later sanctioned by Canada specifically for aiding and supporting gangs.

Though Dorcé and Quitel are no longer serving, Henry also has other advisors connected to gangs.

Gang infiltration extends beyond Haiti’s police to the justice system. The new interim justice minister, Emmelie Prophète Milcé, fired three prosecutors last winter for accepting payoffs from gang members who had been arrested. On April 28, Prophète Milcé reinstated those three prosecutors without explanation.

Workers flee tear gas fired by police as they demonstrate to demand better wages and working conditions in Port-au-Prince on May 9. Richard Pierrin/AFP via Getty Images

Over the past month, I met with 15 members of the Haitian National Police whom I have known for years and trust. Twelve were rank-and-file officers and three were senior in the hierarchy of the force. They hailed from four different units.

Two of the officers told me that, just as they were gaining ground in battles against the Izo gang in its stronghold—the Village de Dieu neighborhood of Port-au-Prince—on May 1, they received the bewildering order to retreat. At least eight other officers told me their colleagues had told them about the order to withdraw from battle. After police officers protested on social media, operations against the Izo gang resumed on May 9. The Haitian National Police did not respond to my request for comment on their changed stance.

The events in Village de Dieu were not the first time Haiti’s police command aborted anti-gang operations. Since June 2022, police officers have reported to me at least five instances when they suddenly got orders to retreat during otherwise successful operations against Innocent, the leader of the Kraze Baryè gang who is on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for his involvement in the 2021 kidnapping of 17 U.S. missionaries in Haiti.

Two officers present at the scene reported to me that, on Feb. 5, during Operation Tornado 1, their team had arrested two of Innocent’s gang members and were on the verge of arresting Innocent himself when their superiors told them to withdraw, which gave Innocent the chance to escape before operations resumed the next day. Three other officers corroborated the story and shared their concerns about the order their colleagues received to abort. Again, the Haitian National Police did not respond to my inquiry about the incident.

Protesters speak with a police officer during a demonstration to demand better wages and working conditions in Port-au-Prince on May 9. Richard Pierrin/AFP via Getty Images

Counterproductive orders during anti-gang operations are not the only way police collaborate with gangs. Over the past 22 months since Moïse’s assassination, my organization has documented gangs beheading, burning, and raping people—and even brutally killing whole families. The police did not intervene or attempt to save lives in any of the six large-scale massacres we have documented under Henry’s government.

My organization has also documented at least three recent instances in which members of the G-9 gang alliance received vehicles from the Haitian National Police and other state agencies and used them to fight rival gangs and massacre bystanders. In late April and early May 2022, during gang fighting in la Plaine du Cul-de-Sac, a neighborhood just outside of Port-au-Prince, members of the G-9 used an armored vehicle belonging to the Haitian National Police. The car had been assigned to the Unit for the Maintenance of Order, a special unit of the police that Chérizier was once a part of and that maintains ties to the G-9. According to our counts, at least 191 people were killed in the fighting. The police waited five days to intervene.

In July 2022, the G-9 used government-owned heavy machinery from the National Equipment Center in fighting against a rival gang in the Cité Soleil slum of Port-au-Prince. In late February and early March of this year, the G-9 used three armored tanks belonging to the Haitian National Police against a local gang in the Bel-Air neighborhood of Port-au-Prince. More than 300 people were killed in the fighting and more than 210 houses were destroyed by state vehicles. The Haitian National Police did not respond to my request for comment about how the gangs had acquired the police vehicles and whether the police had investigated further.

Police almost never act against members of Chérizier’s G-9 gang alliance. Instead, they fight other gangs—G-9 rivals. Even when the G-9 blockaded the country’s main fuel terminal last September, triggering a humanitarian catastrophe and talk of foreign military intervention, police took almost two months to move to assert control.

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People carry a coffin as others protest during a demonstration against Henry and the United Nations amid a health and security crisis in Port-au-Prince on Oct. 21, 2022. Richard Pierrin/AFP via Getty Images

The discussion has now shifted to proposals to bolster the Haitian National Police. U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris recently announced that the State Department would work with the police force to develop a new transnational criminal investigative unit. Canada has planned to provide training to Haitian police officers with a management consulting group. Early in June, an office opened in Port-au-Prince to manage vetting of police officers, but according to my sources, the vetting will be conducted by the Haitian National Police—the source of the problem.

Bolstering the police force will not bring change absent a broader political agreement. The Haitian National Police is split between brave and committed officers fighting gangs and officers who are aiding gangs. If the international community trains and supplies the department now, crooked cops will continue to share tactical information, vehicles, arms, and ammunition with gangs. The hamstrung police force will not make any more headway.

To achieve durable security, Haiti must strenuously vet and restructure the police force so that senior officials connected to gangs leave and remaining officials do not receive gang-protective orders from gang-linked politicians. The current government is invested in the existing system and is not interested in seriously pursuing either measure. Haiti needs a clean, representative interim government to guide and lead these tasks and create a functional police force.

The United States can help. U.S. officials must make it a diplomatic priority to support negotiations for a clean and legitimate interim government.

The United States for at least a century has played an outsize role in Haitian politics—usually to disastrous ends. After Moïse’s assassination, U.S. officials’ support helped install Henry, instead of an interim government or several other competing candidates for head of state. The U.S. envoy to Haiti, Daniel Foote, resigned in September 2021 with a scathing letter decrying the “hubris” of “international puppeteering” in U.S. support for Henry, writing: “This cycle of international political interventions in Haiti has consistently produced catastrophic results.” If U.S. officials received Foote’s message, it seemed to have triggered a reluctance to engage at all.

Haitian civil society leaders have taken the lead in calling for a pathway to democracy through an interim government that can begin to restore trust and democratic institutions. U.S. officials have met with them frequently and urged negotiation with Henry to form a consensus government. But Henry has consistently undermined negotiations, with at least tacit support from the U.S. officials who, by doing nothing, persist in backing him.

U.S. officials should create and execute a clear and consistent policy on Haiti that puts democracy at its center and supports advocates seeking to break the stranglehold of an undemocratic regime. They should support the creation of a representative interim government that can begin to right the wrongs of the past decade, including crucial reform of the police force and justice system.

An interim government could not immediately eradicate gangs. But with clean, democratic leaders, it could begin to break the link between political power and gang violence and establish education and job programs to offer poor young men a viable alternative.

Prophète Milcé recently told Haitians that they have the responsibility to defend themselves against gangs. But it is the Haitian government and police that are responsible for protecting the people. When they fail, the international community—which has contributed to so many of the conditions of that failure—must support the Haitians seeking to build a solution.