The Haitian National Police (HNP or PNH; ; ) is the law enforcement and police force of Haiti within the Ministry of Justice and Public Security. It was created in 1995 to bring public security under civilian control as mandated in Haiti's constitution. The force has about 13,500 officers as of 2025.
The 1987 constitution called for the Public Force of Haiti to consist of the National Police and the Armed Forces, though the military government delayed the creation of a separate police force. Haiti had no history of civilian law enforcement before the founding of the PNH. A police law was passed on 23 December 1994 and the PNH was officially founded on 12 June 1995. After Operation Uphold Democracy led to the restoration of the Jean-Bertrand Aristide administration in October 1994, an Interim Public Security Force was recruited from among soldiers of the military disbanded by Aristide and Haitian refugees to the U.S. that were held at Guantánamo Bay. PNH officers, trained at the newly founded National Police Academy in Pétion-Ville, Port-au-Prince, gradually took over security functions before the IPSF was dissolved in December 1995.
The PNH has been the main security institution in Haiti, though it has been undermined by corruption and shortages of personnel, funding, and basic supplies. As of June 2025, less than 300 of Haiti's 570 municipalities had a police presence. Since the start of the Haitian conflict in 2020 the force has been increasingly strained as armed groups expand their territory.
The PNH is led by the Director-General, assisted by an Inspector-General that ensures that the agency follows its own regulations, and consists of several departments. The two largest sections are the Administrative Police, which is the patrol police, and the Judicial Police, which is responsible for investigations. There are several more specialized units, including a presidential security unit, a SWAT team, and the Haitian Coast Guard.
History Under Jean-Claude Duvalier, the Haitian Police was part of the Haitian Army from 1912 and had 14,000 members divided between the blue-uniformed Port-au-Prince Police and the Rural Security Companies. Since 1987, successive governments attempted to reform the national police as stated by the constitution it was created to maintain peace, enforce law and order in accordance with the rule of law, to protect its citizens and to arrest those that violate the law. However the police, being plagued by militarism, factionalism, and corruption, is mainly viewed by citizens as being repressive.
The 1987 Constitution proposed the establishment of a separate police corps and a new police academy under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice. Political developments in Haiti since 1987, however, have precluded implementation of these changes. Nevertheless, the mission of the police corps was almost indistinguishable from the mission spelled out for the FAd'H. The characterization of the police as a corps armée (armed corps) reinforced this similarity in missions.
The only identifiable police force in Haiti operated in Port-au-Prince as part of the armed forces. This 1,000-member force had few operational or technical capabilities, even though it was responsible for narcotics and immigration control and criminal investigations. In the late 1980s, the Narcotics Bureau, commanded by an army major, had acquired some visibility and resources of its own, with a reported staff of about twenty-five people.
There was no true rural police. Small garrisons, operating under military department command, with some cooperation from the lowest central government administrative head, section chief (chef de section), were responsible for rural security. In effect, the heads of these 562 rural communal sections (sections rurales communales) functioned as police chiefs, as adjuncts of the nation's military infrastructure. This fusion of civil and military administration continued to be possible because of the broad range of responsibilities assigned to the Ministry of Interior and National Defense.
After 1986 the armed forces failed to reestablish a nationwide police force and to subdue the MVSN and other vigilante groups. Some observers have argued that links between the senior army command and remnants of the MVSN have paralyzed reforms in Haiti's judicial system. An illustration of their point was the reported incorporation of some MVSN personnel into FAd'H units and some members of the VSN, as plainclothes paramilitary agents, in the Dessalines Battalion. Other MVSN members found their way into cadres of the Port-au-Prince police force, particularly in the Criminal Investigation Unit (Recheraches Criminelles—renamed in 1988 the Anti-Gang Investigations Bureau), which was traditionally based at the Dessalines barracks. The demise of the Dessalines Battalion and the Leopards, the latter of which had served as Haiti's special weapons and tactics unit, raised questions in the spring of 1989 about the future of a national police force.
The Avril government reported some success in cracking down on abuses within the security services, but violence continued to be a serious problem. Insecurity rose dramatically after 1986 with the formation of ad hoc paramilitary groups that had direct links to the VSN and indirect links to the military. Many of these paramilitary groups engaged in banditry with no political motivation. The security situation in rural regions and at the section chief level remained unclear in 1989.
The human-rights record of post-Duvalier governments was generally negative. A major problem was the inability, or the unwillingness, of the FAd'H to contain domestic political violence. Government and military personnel apparently sanctioned and participated in attacks on politicians and other activists, particularly during the second Namphy government. The Avril government boasted an improved record in this area, but as of mid-1989, it had proved incapable of restoring order.
Haitian military and police often brutally interrogated detainees. Rural section chiefs, who wielded considerable power within their limited jurisdictions, arbitrarily harassed and physically abused citizens, according to some reports. In an effort to address this problem, Avril dismissed a number of section chiefs, and issued a decree in December 1988 that ended appointments of section chiefs and proposed putting the posts up for election (see Urban Dominance, Rural Stagnation, ch. 9).
Harsh conditions prevailed in the prison system. Hygiene, food, and health care were inadequate, and prison staff regularly mistreated inmates. The Avril government closed two facilities closely associated with the repression of the Duvalier regimes— Fort Dimanche and the detention center of the Criminal Investigation Unit, both in Port-au-Prince—because of the abuses that had commonly taken place there.
Political turmoil between 1986 and 1989 resulted in popular justice and mob violence. The international media reported on some of this violence and featured scenes of burning or dismembered bodies. Continued human-rights violations are likely to attract international criticism during the 1990s. Lasting improvements in internal security, however, appeared unlikely without the establishment of functional civilian institutions and some resolution of the status of the former members of the tonton makouts.
Founding of the National Police
In September 1994, the U.S.-led Operation Uphold Democracy ended the military junta led by Raoul Cédras, and in October 1994 President Jean-Bertrand Aristide returned from exile. His administration disbanded the Armed Forces of Haiti in late 1994. The military was replaced by the Interim Public Security Force (IPSF), which was led by former army major Dany Toussaint. The IPSF consisted of about 1,000 Haitian refugees held by the US at Guantánamo Bay and about 3,300 former soldiers that had been vetted to prevent any human rights violators from joining the force. After six days of training that emphasized human rights, the interim police were deployed to provide public security under the oversight of the civilan police officials from the United Nations Mission in Haiti (UNMIH).
Aristide replaced the military with a civilian national police. Haiti had no previous history of civilian law enforcement, and the PNH represents a departure from the army's traditional role of internal security. The law establishing the PNH, passed on 23 December 1994, subordinates it to the Minister of Justice and Public Security, through the Secretary of State for Justice (Public Security).
The PNH is led by a Director-General appointed by the president from among police commanders or directors and subject to Senate approval. There is also the Office of the Inspector-General, tasked with ensuring internal discipline. The two main branches of the PNH are the Administrative Police, responsible for day-to-day public security, and the Judicial Police, a detective force that assists the courts with investigations. The regional structure consists of a police director in each of Haiti's nine departments. Below them are 130 municipal (city) commissioners, 185 sub-commissariats led by a chief inspector, and 577 sub-precincts led by a sergeant, the latter being in a small town, or being the smallest unit within a city or a rural area. Specialized units include the National Palace Guard, the Presidential Security Unit, the Ministerial Security Corps, the Company for Intervention and Maintaining Order (crowd control), and the Intervention Group of the National Police of Haiti (SWAT team). From 1997, the Haitian Coast Guard and the Counter-Narcotics Unit began to be deployed, also under the PNH.
The National Police Academy was inaugurated at the Camp d'Application in Port-au-Prince in January or February 1995. It offered four-month courses to classes of 375 recruits each, and starting from June 1995 they began gradually replacing the IPSF, whose members were proportionally demobilized, starting with the worst that were evaluated by the UNMIH civilian police officials. On 6 December 1995 the IPSF was disbanded and its remaining roughly 1,000 members, consisting of former FAd'H officers and "Guantánamo police" recruits, were incorporated into the PNH. On 17 February 1996 the first stage of the training program for the PNH was completed, with 5,201 recruits having graduated from the National Police Academy. The training there included education on Haitian law and the constitution. The PNH reached its target strength of 6,500 by early 1998, but it declined to 6,000 as of late 1999 because of dismissals, which included some of the newly trained officers. The PNH was considered more respectful of human rights than the FAd'H had been, but struggled to control crime, experiencing a shortage of weapons and demoralization. There was also a lack of senior officers. The PNH remained professional and apolitical from 1995 to 1997, when Aristide started to fill the ranks of the PNH with his own loyalists. The cutoff of US and other foreign assistance in 2000 also undermined the PNH.
2004 coup and after