Haiti’s National Police force, already dangerously understaffed for a country of its size, shrank further in 2023 as deaths in confrontations with gangs, dismissals for misconduct, and resignations driven by danger and inadequate pay reduced the force from approximately 14,772 to around 13,200 officers. The decline in police numbers at precisely the moment when the security threat was intensifying created a dangerous mismatch between the institution’s capacity and the challenges it faced.
Police officers killed in confrontations with gangs represented the most visible dimension of the force’s losses, but resignation and attrition were equally significant. Officers who survived violent encounters but found themselves traumatized, unsupported, and unpaid for weeks at a time made rational calculations about their personal safety and their families’ welfare. For many, leaving the force was the logical conclusion of an assessment that continuing to serve under current conditions was simply too dangerous.
The pay situation was chronic and demoralizing. Police officers at the base of the salary scale earned wages that were inadequate to support a family in a country with high inflation. Salaries that were supposed to arrive monthly sometimes came weeks late or not at all as the government’s fiscal situation deteriorated. Officers who were being asked to risk their lives confronting armed criminals found it difficult to maintain professional motivation when their basic compensation was unreliable.
International partners providing support to the Haitian National Police called for emergency measures including salary support, rapid recruitment and training programs, and specific security measures to protect officers targeted by gangs. They argued that the erosion of police capacity was a self-reinforcing downward spiral that would be extremely difficult to reverse without immediate and sustained intervention.