Indonesia’s police force goes Charlie’s Angels to restore public trust

Taking cue from the 1970s hit TV show Charlie’s Angels one country has hired three “fashionable cops” in an attempt improve public distrust in an institution seen as corrupt.

Indonesia’s police force hired three female cops that “seem more at home on a fashion catwalk than in a congested street," the CS Monitor reports (photo of the cops). 

Eny Regama, Avvy Olivia Atam and Eka Yulianti help monitor traffic in Jakarta’s near 10 million residents every morning. They report daily traffic activities for the morning and evening news. “This is one way of building a good relationship between police and people,” Atam told the CS Monitor.

They all received prior police training; Yulianti worked in the Narcotics Division when she joined the police force in 2006. Nearly a third of the traffic monitoring division that was set up in 2010 by the government are made up of women.

The Indonesian National Police isn’t the only group suffering a tarnished reputation from corruption.

Corruption is a major cause of poverty and violence in certain regions of the country, The Jakarta Globe reports. Politicians in Papua, the largest and easternmost province of Indonesia were reported to have stolen trillions of rupiahs–equivalent to hundreds of thousands of US dollars–that were meant to go into local infrastructure.