Unit for First Response and Intervention - Alpha, commonly referred to as the Alphas or Alfas, was a plain-clothes police and emergency first response unit in

North Macedonia North Macedonia, officially the Republic of North Macedonia, is a landlocked country in Southeast Europe. It shares land borders with Greece to the south, Albania to the west, Bulgaria to the east, Kosovo to the northwest and Serbia to the n ...

. They often received a reputation for mistreatment of prisoners. They were disbanded in 2020.

History

The Alphas were a plain clothed unit of the Macedonian police. Due to several reports of

police brutality Police brutality is the excessive and unwarranted use of force by law enforcement against an individual or Public order policing, a group. It is an extreme form of police misconduct and is a civil rights violation. Police brutality includes, b ...

mentioned in a report from the

Council of Europe The Council of Europe (CoE; , CdE) is an international organisation with the goal of upholding human rights, democracy and the Law in Europe, rule of law in Europe. Founded in 1949, it is Europe's oldest intergovernmental organisation, represe ...

on FYR Macedonia, the Macedonian Ministry of Interior announced that they were temporarily disbanding all Alpha units except the one based in the capital Skopje in 2008. They also announced that during re-run elections during the

2008 Macedonian parliamentary election Early parliamentary elections were held in Macedonia on 1 June 2008, after the Assembly voted to dissolve itself on 12 April 2008. The result was a victory for the VMRO-DPMNE-led alliance, which won 63 of the 120 seats in the Assembly. Backgrou ...

, they announced that only uniformed police would be deployed to polling stations. In a 2009 follow-up review, the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture noted that the disbanding of the majority of the Alpha units in FYR Macedonia led to a significantly reduced number of police mistreatment complaints. In 2014, the Skopje Alpha unit was granted a status by the government of FYR Macedonia as a separate unit to the police for first response purposes within the city boundaries. In 2016, the Alpha unit conducted an unannounced training exercise outside the Embassy of the United States, Skopje which put the embassy into lockdown given they were informed "this is not a drill" and they had not been informed. The captain in charge of the Alphas was reprimanded after a meeting between the police and the embassy. In 2020, the North Macedonian Ministry of Internal Affairs announced that the Alpha units were to be disbanded and replaced with a new Intervention Unit based upon the Croatian Police's equivalent first response unit. The former Alphas commander Primislav Dimovski was appointed as the head of the replacement unit.

References

{{Authority control Specialist law enforcement agencies of North Macedonia 2020 disestablishments in North Macedonia

History

See also

References