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Providing Czechs protection abroad

Petr Torák is the first Roma officer to work in the United Kingdom

By Michael Heitmann
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
July 30th, 2008 issue

MICHAEL HEITMANN/The Prague Post
Torák looks forward to becoming a fully fledged police officer. "I will have more powers to deal with the gangs," he says. "I will be able to arrest based on suspicion."
MICHAEL HEITMANN/The Prague Post
Torák, 27, is currently a police community support officer in Peterborough, in the east of England.
THE TORÁK FILE



Born: Liberec, north Bohemia, 1981
Position: Police community support officer with the British Police
Primary duties: Protecting Central and East European laborers from exploitation
Family: Wife and infant son

Hailed on national television as the “new face of British policing,” Petr Torák’s life in Britain has been an immigrant success story. Forced to flee Liberec, north Bohemia, with his family in 1999, Torák became a police community support officer two years ago and is now on track to become a full-fledged police officer.
Torák’s new hometown and place of service, Peterborough in the east of England, has seen a wave of immigration from Central and Eastern Europe in recent years, and has been dubbed the “new Warsaw” by locals. Some of the cases Torák, 27, has worked on have sent shock waves around the United Kingdom. Czech homeless people, for example, have been lured to England and forced into factory work seven days a week for little or no compensation. In one particular case, a gang forced a starving 22-year-old to toil in the fields as a slave last October.
Based at Bridge Street Police Station in Peterborough, Torák is part of the Community Cohesion Unit, a team that covers the entire city. Both the officers and police community support officers (PCSOs) in the unit are fluent in at least one language other than English and try to interact with the many immigrants living and working in the city of 161,000.
“I can go out on patrol and speak with Czech people, five minutes later I talk to Portuguese people, and another five minutes later I speak to Poles,” Torák said. “It’s really good; I can practice my languages.”
Like the foreigners he protects, Torák knows what it’s like to be stranded in an unfamiliar country. Following a racist attack on him and his mother in 1999, the Torák family left their hometown Liberec immediately. They applied for asylum in the United Kingdom and were issued work permits after a lengthy investigation into their asylum claim.
“The first opportunity I had was working in the fields. Even when it was raining we had to work, cutting roses,” Torák said. It was hard manual labor, and compensation was low, less than minimum wage at £3 ($6/90 Kč) per hour, he added.
Determined to work his way up in the production ranks, Torák eventually became a team leader in a salad factory and then took a job with Hotpoint, a household appliances store, as a customer service adviser.
Torák hit his stride when he started to work for New Link, the Peterborough City Council’s asylum and migration service. He helped recent arrivals fill out forms and make calls to state and social services. His wide-ranging language skills came in handy in this job.
As a PCSO, he quickly added Polish to his repertoire. “I will need to teach my son English and Polish, as it will soon be the second administrative language,” Torák joked.
On the job
Torák describes his work with the Community Cohesion Unit as “gaining intelligence from communities about prostitution, drugs, exploitation and people trafficking.” With officers originally from Pakistan, India, Lithuania and Asian countries, the unit itself mirrors the city’s diversity.
When a police officer went to the scene of a burglary recently, he wasn’t able to gain much information from the victims. “A few days later, we got twice or three times more information from the victim than the police officer,” Torák said. “We gain people’s trust very easily and very quickly. We are from their country and we know their language, and we have a uniform on us as well.”
While Torák will lay claim to being the first Roma police officer from the Czech Republic in the United Kingdom, he has counterparts in his home country. “Citizens of the Roma national minority work for the Czech police force,” said Police Presidium spokeswoman Veronika Benediktová.
Czech police, for example, are running a special project at the police school in Holešov that aims to draw more minority members to the force. The “Police for Everyone” program will take on 90 students in the 2008–09 school year, 20 of whom are from minority groups, Benediktová said.
Modern-day slavery
Torák’s typical case involves fighting the exploitation of agricultural workers by East European gangs.
“People come to the Czech Republic or Slovakia, to Hlavní nádraží and other train stations, and tell homeless people: I’ve got a good job for you in the United Kingdom, if you want it. I will give you 15,000 Kč every month, plus you will get accommodation and food.”
After being relocated, these recruits are often expected to work seven days a week and 12 hours a day. “Normally the worker would get about £250 per week. But the gangmaster gives them about £12 out of 250. It’s slavery,” Torák said.
“In Petersborough, we have maybe 80 victims of exploitation at the moment.”
He estimates that, exploitation affects hundreds of Czechs and Slovaks throughout England. In rare cases, gangs even take their victims to banks, where they use their identity to take out loans. “They take loans of £15,000. For these homeless people, it’s huge money, especially converted into crowns, and they will never be able to pay it back,” Torák said.
In October 2007, Torák helped rescue a 22-year-old man from the hands of a ruthless criminal. “He contacted me through his friends. We managed to help him get out of the house and we arrested the person,” Torák said. “It’s using peoples’ vulnerability. They are so near the bottom and get exploited so they’re even [lower],” he said. The unidentified man, from Eastern Europe, had been denied a change of clothes for a year and was forced to pick vegetables.
Torák’s job as a PCSO is not without risks. Around Christmas last year, he received threats from local gangmasters. Authorities installed video surveillance cameras at his house, and Torák couldn’t go on patrol for several weeks. “I was the only officer on the front line who was talking to victims and gangmasters,” Torák said. “So they thought, ‘Oh, if we get rid of him, then our problem is solved.’ ”
As a PCSO, Torák’s powers have sometimes been insufficient. “If somebody comes to me and says, this person stole my mobile, I cannot arrest him since I didn’t see him steal it,” he explained.
“As PCSOs do not go through the full high level of training that police officers do, and are not on a similar salary structure, their powers are obviously not the same as those of properly trained officers,” said John Peach, the leader of the Peterborough City Council.
But, as of Aug. 11, Torák will begin his police training. “I will have more powers to deal with the gangs. I will be able to arrest based on suspicion,” Torák said.
In the meantime, Torák is back in the Czech Republic. His wife, Lucie, 24, gave birth to a boy, David, June 8. Lucie, originally from a town near Prague, had been living in England when she met Torák on the Internet. The two were married in July 2007.
Trying to rent a summer home near Prague, Torák encountered some of the prejudices that made his parents leave the country. “I was talking to a man from a real estate agency. And he told me, probably without realizing that I’m Roma myself, that they are not renting houses to Ukrainians, Roma and other ‘socially degraded’ people,” Torák recounted.
When Lucie introduced Torák to her parents in the Czech Republic, Torak asked her about their reaction afterward. “She said they were shocked. They were not very happy with the fact that I’m Roma,” Torák said. “But I visited them and talked to them, and they realized I’m a normal person like anybody else. And that I’m educated. Now they call me their son,” he said.

Michael Heitmann can be reached at mheitmann@praguepost.com


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