Two years ago, men wearing the blue uniforms of Iraqi national policemen abducted American freelance reporter Steve Vincent in the southern city of Basra, just days after Vincent had published an article in the New York Times accusing the local police force of operating nighttime "death squads" that murdered opponents of the dominant religious parties.

Whether the abductors were actually policemen, or just posing as them, there is little doubt that Iraq's 300,000 police have been an object of great concern for coalition trainers working to rebuild Iraq's security forces.

But the police are rapidly improving, according to one British Army general overseeing their training.

"The national police have had a dubious past and come with a dubious reputation," admits Brigadier General Rob Weighill, Deputy Commander of the Civilian Police Assistance Transition Team, or CPAT, based in Baghdad. CPAT works with the Iraqi Interior Ministry to train, equip and monitor the national police, traffic cops and border patrolmen.

But Weighill says that, in stark contrast to press reports going back years, he has not discovered any significant infiltration of the police force by Iraq's radical religious militias such as Moqtada Al Sadr's Mahdi Army.  

Corruption, on the other hand, continues to be an issue. "They'll never get rid of corruption, but they're making huge strides towards reducing it," Weighill says of the Interior Ministry. He cites the creation of an internal affairs division and an inspector general's office. In January alone, these authorities investigated 1,200 corruption claims against the Iraqi police, Weighill reports. He says any officers found guilty of charges have been sacked or punished.

"What we've seen in the past is a lack of leadership," Weighill says. "The leadership element in the Iraqi police is improving all the time." One result, he adds, is that "we've come a long way towards imposing a measurable standard of quality across the Iraqi police."

Quality training is critical to sustaining those improvements, and to that end, CPAT and the Interior Ministry have built a 2,000-billet national police training academy that houses entire regional brigades one at a time for four-week courses taught by a combination of Iraqi instructors and CPAT's 600 civilian and military coalition advisors.

Despite improvements in coalition support for the police in recent years, Weighill says that resources are still a problem. "More money needs to be spent on vehicles and the provision of fuel."

Even though they are under-equipped compared to their brethren in the Iraqi army, the police are contributing to ongoing "surge" operations in Baghdad, Weighill says. "These 'shurti' are doing a pretty good job in highly demanding circumstances," he contends, using the Arabic word for "cop."