Don't Call the Cops

Police headquarters is a curving blue, red and white structure. It looks imported from 1970s Washington in the colors of the Liberian, and not so coincidentally, American flag. Scraps of filthy carpeting partially conceal the concrete floor. The room dividers are made from wood panel and glass, the ecstatic colored curtains drawn in some pretense of privacy. We are waiting for George Bardue, the police spokesman, to talk about a policy that orders the arrest and fining of parents who send their children to work on the streets and in the markets rather than to school. It stems from a 2007 program to make primary school free and compulsory. Bardue asks us if we've brought the policy. He's skeptical the law dictates the police do anything about truant children or their parents. When we insist it does, he relents and says that the policy is very lightly enforced. Nonetheless, he says the police pick up one or two children a day. He says they're brought in and asked where their parents are, and sometimes counseled, sometimes taken to one of Monrovia's overcrowded, private welfare agencies. "We don't arrest children," he says emphatically. Though by this point he's acknowledged that the policy exist, he remains defensive about the police's role in carrying it out. "You hear these parents' stories, all they're going through, and you know you can't do anything," he says.