Cleansing the police as a political concept: who cleanses, whom, and before whom

At a bakery at Crveni Krst, on Monday May 26 around 7:10 in the morning, an elderly man in a work jacket orders a cheese burek and, in the same breath, says to the cashier: “They are going to clean up the police now; you heard the president.” The cashier nods and says: “Let them; just so it gets better for us too.” The man answers, putting his change back in his pocket: “I hope so too, but who is going to clean them up.” The exchange lasts forty seconds, with a burek as its punctuation, but it compresses all the helplessness of control over an institution that is supposed to control us.

I visit this bakery several times a week, before going to lectures. A conversation of this kind was not standard in the morning, until last week. It became standard after a statement by President Aleksandar Vucic, made publicly in the context of the Senjak case, that a law would be prepared to remove from police duties up to two thousand officers, as part of a wider Interior Ministry reform. The number is large, but the number is not what is driving conversations at the bakery. The conversation is driven by the word “cleansing.” The elderly man heard the word on television the previous evening and accepted it; the cashier accepted it from his mouth; but the second question, “who will cleanse them,” went unanswered.

Sociologically, the concept of “cleansing an institution” is politically heavy for one simple reason: it presumes the existence of an actor standing above the institution whose authority is sufficient to dictate who stays and who leaves. In a democratic model of institutional reform, that actor is usually a parliamentary body acting on the basis of an independent inquiry, with a procedure guaranteeing that decisions about individuals are not made by political will but by a documented process. When, instead, the announcement of reform is made from the position of the executive, with a number already pronounced before anyone being dismissed has had a chance to defend themselves, the sociologist must ask what exactly this reform is. Is it a reform of the institution, or is it a consolidation of control over the institution, carried out under the name of reform.

This is not about cynicism towards the need for reforms. After the Senjak case, in which the former head of the Belgrade City Police Administration, Veselin Milic, was detained and the prosecutor asked for thirty days of pre-trial detention, the question of change inside the Interior Ministry is no longer academic. The question has become acute, in the sense in which German sociologist Max Weber, in his 1919 lecture “Politics as a Vocation” (Serbian translation by Olga Kostresevic, Mladost 1986), distinguished an “ethics of conviction” from an “ethics of responsibility.” The ethics of conviction demands that bad people be removed, regardless of procedure. The ethics of responsibility demands that the removal be carried out so that the institution after the reform is stronger, not merely more obedient. The difference between the two is the difference between a purge and a reform. The announcement on Pink, with the number two thousand and the word “cleansing,” is so far closer to the first than to the second.

Here I bring in the counter-argument, serious in this case. There is a reading, often heard in circles not sympathetic to the ruling party, that any removal of police officers involved in compromising conduct, even if it is called “cleansing,” is a net gain for citizens. By that logic, sociological worry about the term is a luxury we can afford only if the institution is already working. The argument has weight. I would answer as follows. If police reform is carried out without a serious body to oversee it (and Demostat’s April 2026 survey, showing only fourteen percent of citizens trust the Anti-Corruption Agency, suggests no such body currently exists), then two thousand dismissals will be an administrative operation, not an institutional change. People will be replaced, but the system that produced the Senjak case will stay the same.

Here it is worth naming sociologist Mladen Lazic, who in his study “Waiting for Capitalism” (Sluzbeni Glasnik, 2011) describes the Serbian transition as a process in which institutions changed facades but not the inner logic of the distribution of power. Lazic’s argument, applied to the 2026 Interior Ministry, would read roughly as follows: an institution in which the chief follows the orders of a political centre and not professional standards does not become a different institution simply because the chief is changed. It becomes a different institution only if the relationship between politics and the profession inside it is changed. That is a sociological condition that cannot be delivered by a law on dismissals. It can only be delivered by a law on independence, which the announced reform has not yet announced.

There is one more thing to say plainly. The word “cleansing,” in the Serbian political vocabulary of the 20th century, has a specific history. It was used in the administrations of 1945 and 1948, in the context of party reckonings in the 1960s and 1970s, in compromising waves in certain institutions in the 1990s. A sociologist does not mention this to impose a parallel, but to say the following: language is not innocent. A president who chooses “cleansing” over “reform” chooses it deliberately. The term “cleansing” works on the listener through what they hear in a tone of decisiveness, not in a concern for procedure. The elderly man at the bakery is an example: he accepted the word. But the second question he asked, the one about who will cleanse them, remains a question of control. And control, in a democracy, does not belong to whoever announces a reform. It belongs to whoever can also revoke it, if it turns out not to be a reform.

I return briefly to the bakery. When the elderly man left with his burek, the cashier said, more to herself than to me: “Well, somebody would have to cleanse each of us.” I carry that sentence around all day. If Interior Ministry reform succeeds in such a measure that, after it, the police are accountable not only to the president but also to parliament, civil oversight and judicial procedures, the cashier could a year from now recall this morning with relief. If, instead, the reform is reduced to operational personnel replacement, the bakery at Crveni Krst will remain a place where the same question is asked, day after day, in different variants. A sociologist does not prescribe which of these two outcomes will prevail. They only draw attention to which kind of language is now leading where.