Goran Petrovic Loses Police Rank Over Facebook Cartoon

The disciplinary commission of the Interior Ministry (MUP) has rejected the appeal of Goran Petrovic, a traffic police officer from Valjevo, upholding the penalty imposed on him by the disciplinary body of the Valjevo Police Department. The trigger was a cartoon he posted on his Facebook profile in November 2024. Petrovic is the husband of police major Katarina Petrovic. The decision became public on the evening of October 19, when Nova.rs published it, and N1 and Vreme followed.

The penalty is “loss of acquired rank and assignment of the next lower rank.” Headlines shorten this to “stripped of rank,” but formally it is a demotion. According to Vreme, the loss of rank also affects Petrovic’s pay. In the sources we reviewed, there is no reaction from the Interior Ministry to the media reports.

What does the cartoon that started the case show?

The drawing is the work of a Polish satirist from the 1980s. N1 reports that the author is Andrzej Krauze and that the cartoon was made during martial law in Poland. It shows a police officer in full gear coming home, with a child running into his arms at the family doorstep, while red boot prints trail behind him.

Petrovic posted it on a locked profile that only people he had approved could see. The cartoon was then taken from his account and shared in a Viber group called “PU Valjevo.” The disciplinary proceedings were initiated by the head of traffic police in Valjevo, Lieutenant Colonel Predrag Radosavljevic, who claimed that Petrovic had committed a serious breach of duty because “his conduct damages the reputation of the MUP.” Dejan Ostojic accepted the initiative and opened the case, and the first-instance proceedings were led by the disciplinary officer, Major Mirjana Milovanovic.

What does Petrovic argue in his appeal?

According to N1, which cites the appeal reviewed by Danas, Petrovic claims that the operative part of the penalty is incorrect and unclear. It states that the drawing harmed the reputation of the police because it caused resentment and unpleasant feelings among some officers. The officer disputes this, and above all stresses that the post was not public:

Freedom of thought and expression is a constitutional category, and I shared someone else’s expression for the purpose of further conversation with a limited and precisely defined group of people, my mutual followers, and not with the public. I repeat again, Facebook is a public social network, but a conversation on it is not public if the user restricts it, which is what I did, so the public was excluded in my use of Facebook, and the post was not public

That is how Petrovic explained it in his appeal to the disciplinary officer of the Valjevo Police Department, as reported by N1. In the same document he invokes the Code of Police Ethics:

By which I allegedly acted contrary to Article 5 and Article 14 of the Code of Police Ethics, which is illogical because the Ministry of Interior of Serbia was not mentioned at all, nor was the actual work of the Serbian police, nor was the photograph of the drawing publicly posted in a way that could harm the reputation of the Ministry, which was indisputably established as fact in the proceedings, and so the operative part is the product of a malicious interpretation of the facts

According to Vreme, the appeal also states that Milovanovic questioned the initiators of the case, Radosavljevic and Ostojic, as witnesses, even though they have the status of a party to the proceedings.

Who were the witnesses in the proceedings?

Four more police officers were heard as witnesses: Milan Cvijic, Zoran Vukosavljevic, Ranko Jevtic and Milovan Mirkovic. According to a Nova source, their statements were largely identical. Jevtic said he has no Facebook account and that a colleague showed him the drawing, but that he recognized himself in the police officer in the cartoon because of the bloody footprints. The same source claims that the drawing contains no specific features linking it to the Serbian police.

Nova reports that the names of all four appear in a criminal complaint filed with the Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime over suspected violence against students and citizens in Valjevo in August 2025. Vreme writes about a pre-investigation procedure over the same event, and according to its reporting Petrovic’s lawyer states in the appeal that most of the witnesses are suspected of abuse and torture. These are suspicions, not established guilt.

Background: Katarina Petrovic and her earlier suspension

Katarina Petrovic made public a report on a traffic accident in Dedinje in March 2023. According to the first police findings, Nikola Petrovic, a godfather of Aleksandar Vucic, was driving a McLaren under the influence of cocaine and alcohol and injured two women. She was arrested and suspended for two years, and in the proceedings for disclosing an official secret she was acquitted by a final ruling. She was removed from work again in late March 2026, after the launch of her book “On the Road to Freedom” in Novi Sad. According to Vreme and N1, about ten disciplinary complaints have been filed against her in the Valjevo Police Department over her public appearances.

In its article, Nova claims that Goran Petrovic was punished because of his wife. An anonymous source at that outlet adds that “warnings” reached Petrovic that he could be transferred from Valjevo to another city. Vreme also reports that a second disciplinary case was brought against him over statements about the decision that removed him from the working group investigating the murder of journalist Milan Pantic.