Bulgaria is reportedly the European Union state with the least transparent police force and its law-enforcement officers enjoy the least public trust in the EU. Hence it may surprise some people that, as reported by Deutsche Welle, in a recent poll to find the politician of the year Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov came top.

In his comments since coming to power last July, Tsvetanov seems to have adopted a get-tough approach to the issue of organised crime.

"We've been seeing it for the past 20 years - all the things the police and the judiciary have allowed to happen," Tsvetanov has said. "Certain individuals commit crimes but they always escape the justice that they ought to face."

Yet Deutsche Welle reports that "of all the European Union member states, Bulgaria releases the least amount of information to the public about what its police force does. There is no public data about the police's budget, for instance, and there are no reliable crime statistics".

According to Zvezda Vankova, a police expert with the democratic rights organisation Open Society Institute (OSI), the police simply do not have the data. "What I've seen in my fight to get information is that it's not very systematic," she is quoted by Deutsche Welle. "They lack a good system for getting data and making an analysis. I don't think they have any expert groups who are able to produce the necessary analytical papers."

Another OSI expert, Ivanka Ivanova, is quoted in the same article as saying that even when data is available, the police's instinct is not to share it. "The Bulgarian police have this hangover from communist times that leads them to believe that if they reveal more information about their activities, they will be less trusted by the public," she told Deutsche Welle.

Yet, according to Ivanova, this self-perception is probably mistaken.

"EU countries such as Finland, Denmark or Germany, who reveal the most information about their police, also have the highest levels of public trust," Ivanova concludes.

According to Deutsche Welle, "experts agree that releasing data would change that. If people knew what the police were doing, the average person on the street might have more respect for them".