Alpha (Police Unit)

Unit for First Response and Intervention - Alpha, commonly referred to as the Alphas or Alfas, was a plain-clothes police and emergency first response unit in North Macedonia.^[1] They often received a reputation for mistreatment of prisoners. They were disbanded in 2020.^[2]

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Macedonian. (April 2025) Click [show] for important translation instructions.

View a machine-translated version of the Macedonian article.
Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Macedonian Wikipedia article at [[:mk:ЕПОИ „Алфа“]]; see its history for attribution.
You may also add the template {{Translated|mk|ЕПОИ „Алфа“}} to the talk page.
For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Quick Facts (Macedonian: Алфа), Abbreviation ...

Alpha (Macedonian: Алфа)
Abbreviation	UFRI (Macedonian: (ЕПОИ))
Jurisdictional structure
Operations jurisdiction	North Macedonia
Legal jurisdiction	Ministry of Internal Affairs
Governing body	Government of North Macedonia
Operational structure
Overseen by	Ministry of Internal Affairs
Headquarters	Skopje
Elected officer responsible	Oliver Spasovski, Ministry of Internal Affairs
Parent agency	Government of North Macedonia
Website
www.mvr.gov.mk

History

Summarize

Perspective

The Alphas were a plain clothed unit of the Macedonian police.^[1] Due to several reports of police brutality mentioned in a report from the Council of Europe on FYR Macedonia, the Macedonian Ministry of Interior announced that they were temporarily disbanding all Alpha units except the one based in the capital Skopje in 2008.^[3] They also announced that during re-run elections during the 2008 Macedonian parliamentary election, they announced that only uniformed police would be deployed to polling stations.^[1] In a 2009 follow-up review, the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture noted that the disbanding of the majority of the Alpha units in FYR Macedonia led to a significantly reduced number of police mistreatment complaints.^[4]

In 2014, the Skopje Alpha unit was granted a status by the government of FYR Macedonia as a separate unit to the police for first response purposes within the city boundaries.^[5] In 2016, the Alpha unit conducted an unannounced training exercise outside the Embassy of the United States, Skopje which put the embassy into lockdown given they were informed "this is not a drill" and they had not been informed. The captain in charge of the Alphas was reprimanded after a meeting between the police and the embassy.^[6] In 2020, the North Macedonian Ministry of Internal Affairs announced that the Alpha units were to be disbanded and replaced with a new Intervention Unit based upon the Croatian Police's equivalent first response unit.^[2] The former Alphas commander Primislav Dimovski was appointed as the head of the replacement unit.^[7]

Remove ads

Alpha (Police Unit)

History

See also

References

Wikiwand - on