PDU staff members joined the MoIA’s “Operational Centre” on election days to ensure direct and immediate information sharing and verification and co-ordination of actions with MoIA officials regarding violations of election security. During the pre-election period, PDU assisted MoIA with printing of 7,000 pocket-size instruction booklets for police officers involved in providing security on election days. Strengthening the Police-Public Partnership In order to enhance community-oriented policing in the host country, the Mission designed an Exit Strategy from Community Policing in 2013. This was aimed at ensuring a smooth handover of the Mission initiatives to the national authorities through tailored capacity building. This hand-over is expected to be completed by 2015. In 2014, the PDU carried out activities to strengthen the capacity of the Local Prevention Councils (LPCs) and Citizen’s Advisory Groups (CAGs), which had been established over the past years on a countrywide basis with the assistance of the Mission’s former Police Development Department. Building on work implemented in 2013, the PDU collaborated with local authorities in 2014 to further strengthen the role of the CAGs and LPCs in promoting communication regarding local issues, such as tensions after several high-profile inter-ethnic incidents and tackling the problem of local juvenile violence. The PDU’s field-deployed Police Affairs (PA) Teams - each consisting of a Police Adviser and a Program Assistant continued to monitor the functioning of the CAGs and LPCs and provided advice when required. In this framework, a considerable number of meetings with local communities at ethnically mixed areas (especially within SIAs Skopje, Tetovo and Kumanovo) were organized in 2014 on the initiative of Police Prevention Units. As result of this enhanced police-public partnership, two Prevention Centres have been established in 2014 in the Skopje municipalities of Gjorce Petrov and Gazi Baba to serve as additional forums of discussion for topics of common interest, such as domestic violence, disturbance of public order and burglaries. The PDU’s co-located Police Advisers continued to utilize their close contacts and professional working relations in the field in order to enhance links with various local communities. Using these links, the PDU’s co-located Police Advisers, together with the Monitoring Unit of the Mission, provided assistance and advice in to local communities to address a number of community concerns and inter-ethnic incidents. In Tetovo, the PDU co-located staff helped to raise awareness among youth on the consequences of violence and the importance of tolerance and improved communication between students of different ethnic groups by organizing sports games and delivering of 316 lectures for all the first-year high school students of mixed ethnicity. In addition, in Ohrid, a partnership with a local NGO network was established in March 2014 to increase the level of trust and co-operation between the police and public across the multi-ethnic areas in the Ohrid SIA region. The NGO umbrella activities targeted citizens (especially youth), police officers, state and local institutions and their Municipal Commissions. Furthermore, as mentioned previously, the Mission supported the implementation of the Public Perception Survey on Policing 2014, which aimed to measure the perception of both citizens and police on public safety and police work. In light of the Mission’s withdrawal from the community-policing sphere in 2015, the survey had to identify the remaining shortcomings, which the Mission shall focus on in 2015. The survey confirmed an increased level of trust regarding police work. The positive perception of citizens regarding police officers’ conduct in 2014 has increased by ten per cent as compared to 2010 and 2012. 110