Imagine you’re a fresh young graduate of Romania’s police academy. After being showered with congratulations from your family, you are posted to a police station that looks something like the one photographed below, in Romania’s western Bihor County.

Inside the station, your office is choked with smoke from an antique wood-fired heater, there’s no hot water to wash your hands, and the only toilet is an outhouse in the yard.

Today, serving police officers tell RFE/RL this grim scenario is commonplace in many rural areas of Romania.

"I can tell you that every now and then we are supplied detergent to wash our hands,” a serving policeman in Romania’s eastern Braila County, told RFE/RL. “Occasionally, and I emphasize only occasionally, we get toilet paper, but there are some stations that don't even have a squat toilet,” said the policeman, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The dismal state of many rural police station facilities was also confirmed by officers from Galati, Neamt, and Bihor counties.

Toma Vleonga was the chief of police in Tupilati, a village in northeastern Romania until December 2024, when he retired. In the 2000s he says, there were three officers at the station where he worked. But after sweeping budget cuts were made in 2011, “the work of those three officers was left solely to me,” he told RFE/RL.

The retired police officer was often forced to buy resources for the police station from his own pocket, including stationery and toiletries.

Vleonga says he dreaded the moment people asked to use the toilet in his station. Unwilling to direct them to the outhouse in the yard, the policeman instead pointed people to the nearby city hall, or a neighboring shop.

Police leadership paints an altogether different picture of their workplaces. "We make all the necessary efforts to ensure a quality police service and an optimal working climate for police officers, both in rural and urban areas," Bogdan Despescu, a senior official in Romania’s Interior Ministry, told RFE/RL.

Despescu has vowed to spend some 750 million euros ($780 million) to modernize Romania’s 2,800 police stations. But many rural police officers have heard similar promises before, and are running out of patience. In 2024, some 4,700 police officers left the service, most through retirement, while only around 2,000 new recruits were hired. Police officers in Romania are able to draw a pension after 25 years of service.

Cosmin Andreica, the leader of Romania's Europol Police Union claims police workplaces, which are often far below Romania’s health and safety standards, are approved by the same authority overseeing the police.

“The Interior Ministry send health inspectors from their own medical department. Even stations without running water, without an indoor toilet, with dreadful conditions,” get approved, Andreica says. “If [inspections] were carried out properly, at least 2,000 police stations in Romania would need to be shut down."

Police are forbidden from publishing images inside police buildings, but RFE/RL obtained several photos showing the dire state of some rural stations.

Interior Ministry official Despescu points out that, in the case of toilets and running water, it is in many cases a wider problem of the villages in which stations are located.

"It was brought to our attention that some police stations are not connected to the sewerage system. That does not take into account the fact that in many rural settlements there is no sewerage system for them to be connected to,” he said.

But poor working conditions is a major factor in a staffing crisis for police in Romania. According to official statistics, Romania’s police force requires 65,000 officers to be considered fully staffed. Some 45,000 police are currently serving in the country, the lowest number since the 1990s.

And the drastic shortage of police is having tragic consequences for rural Romanians.

On June 10, 2024, Radita Dumitrascu, a 44-year-old woman from the Braila region desperately rang the police to report that her partner Dumitru Lalu was attacking her and that she feared for her life. When two police teams arrived in the village of some 2,000 people they spoke to neighbors on the block where the call had come from. None had reported hearing anything unusual, so the officers left. The following day, the bodies of Dumitrascu, who had been stabbed to death, and Lalu, who had committed suicide, were discovered.

Vitalie Josanu, who heads a Romanian police union says that the force now has little appeal for young people, and calls for a total upheaval of the hierarchy. “Those who led the Romanian police force into this disaster are not the ones who can fix the situation; a change is needed,” he told RFE/RL.

Josanu says his own image of today’s police force in his country came after he personally called the police after spotting what appeared to be illegal loggers at work.

“After two and a half hours a young policewoman showed up with a gun in her holster. When I asked her why she was alone she told me there was no one else available to come, Josanu told RFE/RL. “She was sent into the forest alone to confront poachers. For me, this sums up the state of Romania’s police force today.”