Police Reform in Violent Democracies in Latin America
2012, Hague Journal on the Rule of Law
Related papers
Challenges of police reform in Latin America
Routledge Handbook of Law and Society in Latin America, 2019
Police forces in Latin America have experienced multiple processes of limited reforms over recent decades. In most cases there is a general consensus that police institutions are not well prepared, equipped or trained to deal with the increasing complexities of the criminal world and the illicit markets that are rapidly developing. This chapter emphasizes the structural limitations of police organizations and the double edge process of militarization and privatization of public security. In a context of high concerns over increasing levels of violence and crime, reforming the police ha become a political issue more than a technocratic one, and the way political debate develops signals the boundaries of policy implementation. The chapter defines future directions for policy implementation as well as research on police reform initiatives that would be key to strengthen rule of law in Latin America.
Making Police Reform Matter in Latin America
2023
Police forces in Latin America historically have been regarded as hopelessly corrupt, inefficient, and even abusive. More recently, however, there have been clear signs that police reforms have gained traction in the region—with some notable exceptions. The authors of this book explore the scope of the reforms that have been enacted in a diverse group of countries, their impact on police-society relations, and perhaps most important, how sustainable they are proving to be in the current climate of democratic decline.
‘Cycles of Police Reform in Latin America’ in David J. Francis (ed.) Policing in Africa, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012: 165-90. ISBN 978-0-230-33947-7
This book chapter highlights a number of lessons suggested by various efforts to reform the police in Latin America over the period 1995-2010 . It focuses on two clusters of countries in Latin America. One is Brazil and the Southern Cone countries (Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay), which made the transition to democracy from prolonged military authoritarian rule in the mid- to late 1980s. The other is Central America and the Andean region (principally El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, and Colombia), which emerged/have been emerging from armed conflict since the mid- 1990s. The chapter examines first the long history of international involvement in police and security sector reform in order to identify long-run tropes and path dependencies. It then focuses on a number of recurring themes: cycles of de- and re-militarization of the policing function; the “security gap” and “democratization dilemmas” involved in structural reforms; the opportunities offered by decentralization for more community-oriented police; and police capacity to resist reform and undermine accountability mechanisms.
Research on Latin American police: where do we go from here
Police Practice and Research, 2009
Policing dilemmas in Latin America. Police reform and cultural change in the framework of citizen security in Argentina. Ideas and implications (2016)
After referring to the novel and evolving field of 'public security policy' in Latin America and the meaning of 'citizen security', where community plays a relevant role, the article considers 'police reform', as an alternative approach to leave behind the legacy of militarism and authoritarian policing practices, as a path to police democratisation. The importance of 'police culture' is highlighted, as well as the field interactions between police and society. This article exposes the experience of the police reform process of the Buenos Aires province, Argentina, in fact, its two stages, describing in particular the approach, methodology, and results of the program of police cultural change implemented during 2006 and 2007 under civilian supervision. It is recognised a lack of political commitment to sustain long-term reforms. Police reform has not been an imperative but a reactive policy response under crisis. Obstacles encountered and cultural change challenges are further discussed. This article suggests that police reform and police studies in Latin America need to be in close partnership; the practical cooperation between scholars and decision-makers/practitioners involved in the logic of police reform appears as a sound approach.
Latin America: Policing Practices
Encyclopedia of Public Administration and Public Policy, Third Edition, Taylor and Francis., 2016
This entry describes policing practices in Latin America, their main drivers, and the consequences. Although crime problems and types of police forces vary throughout the region, it is possible to observe similar practices inspired by international policing models but adapted to local situations. Two examples of policing practices are presented and the entry concludes with a discussion of challenges to increase effectiveness in Latin American police forces.
Ronald E. Ahnen - The Politics of Police Violence in Democratic Brazil - Latin American Politics & Society 49:1
2007
More than a decade after Latin America's most recent turn to democracy, unchecked police violence and torture continue and in some cases have increased. This study examines police killings in 19 Brazilian states from 1994 to 2001 and finds that democracy has not substantially reduced these types of human rights violations, for two reasons. First, underlying social conflict has continued
Militarization of Public Security in Latin America: Where Are the Police?
Latin American Security: Canadian and international perspectives, 2013
A realistic look at Latin American community policing programmes
Policing & Society, 2012
Since the 1990s, every proclamation for police reform in Latin America leads to the launching of a community policing programme designed to improve police-community relations. Each of these programmes has a different name and format; some have lasted a long time, while others have been ephemeral. Community police as a proposal, strategy or philosophy for police activities is without a doubt quite popular. At various moments, police forces that are otherwise divergent in nature have all launched programmes to improve their community relations. Those agencies include The Guatemalan National Civil Police, the Panamanian National Police, the Nicaraguan Police, preventative police in various Mexican Municipalities, the Carabineros in Chile, various Argentine provincial police, the Colombian National Police, the Dominican Republic National Police, the Police of Buenos Aires Province, among many others. The fact that both politicians and police leadership constantly invoke the need to improve relations between police and the communities they serve is undoubtedly a positive step. There is recognition that the police owe something to citizens and that they should consider public demands and expectations. But beyond these aspects, we have to ask if the various practices carried out under the auspices of community policing express a similar understanding of the community policing model, the likelihood that this model might become established within the region and the necessary institutional adaptations to make that feasible.
POLICE REFORM IN VIOLENT DEMOCRACIES
IN LATIN AMERICA
Mariana Mota Prado*
Michael Trebilcock**
Patrick Hartford***
August 16, 2012
We would like to thank for helpful comments and suggestions participants in the Faculty Workshop at the
University of Toronto Faculty of Law (February 13, 2012), the Law and Economic Development Conference
(University of Chicago Law School, April 20-21, 2012) and the SELA Conference (Seminar in Latin America on
Constitutional and Political Theory, Mexico City, June 8-10, 2012). Special thanks to Daniel Brinks, Eduardo
Estevez and Linn Hammergren for detailed comments on earlier drafts. The usual disclaimers apply.
*
Associate Professor, Faculty of Law University of Toronto
**
University Professor and Chair in Law and Economics, University of Toronto
***
JD/MGA Candidate, University of Toronto
Table of Contents
I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................. 1
II. THE STATE OF POLICING IN LATIN AMERICA ......................................................... 7
a. The Aspiration: Democratic Policing ................................................................................... 7
b. The Reality: Non-democratic Policing ................................................................................. 9
c. The Problem: Types of Deviations from the Democratic Criteria...................................... 12
III. POLICE REFORM IN LATIN AMERICA ...................................................................... 15
a. Independence: Dealing with the Principal-Agent Problem ................................................ 17
b. Accountability: Chosing the Right Sequence ..................................................................... 21
c. Bypassing Dysfunctional Institutions ................................................................................. 28
IV. CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................................... 38
1
I. INTRODUCTION
Violence has become an increasingly serious problem in many developing countries.
According to a recent (2011) World Bank World Development Report, entitled Conflict and
Development: Overcoming Conflict and Fragility, security is a “primary development challenge
of our time.”1 In addition to traditional forms of urban violence, new threats have emerged such
as organized crime and trafficking, civil unrest due to global economic shocks, and terrorism.2
One and a half billion people live in areas affected by fragility, conflict, or organized criminal
violence.
Within developing countries, Latin America faces particularly acute problems with
violence: while homicide rates have been decreasing in most of the world, Latin American and
Caribbean countries are the exception, possibly only accompanied by parts of sub-Saharan
Africa.3 Indeed, after experiencing a steep rise in crime rates in the 1990s, Latin America is
currently one of the most violent regions in the world.4 While data is not available for some
African countries, the Latin American/Central American/Caribbean region (LAC) has the highest
homicide rates per 100,000 of population per region per year. According to the UNODC 2011
World Homicide Report, eight of the ten countries with the highest reported homicide rates in the
world are located in this region:5
1
The World Bank, “Conflict, Security, and Development,” World Development Report 2011 (Washington: The
World Bank, 2011), 1.
2
Ibid, 3.
3
Ibid, 9.
4
Rodrigo Soares and Joana Naritomi, “Understanding High Crime Rates in Latin America: The Role of Social and
Policy Factors,” in The Economics of Crime: Lessons For and From Latin America, ed. Rafael Di Tella (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2010); Julio Jacobo Waiselfisz, Mapa da Violencia: Os jovens da America Latina
(Rede de Informação Tecnológica Latino-Americana (RITLA) and Ministério da Educação, 2008).
5
United Nations Office on Drug and Crime. “UNODC Homicide Statistics,” United Nations Office on Drugs and
Crime, accessed January 17, 2012, http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/homicide.html. See Appendix
A for a complete list of homicide rates in Latin America.
2
1 Honduras 82.1 LAC
2 El Salvador 66 LAC
3 Cote d’Ivoire 56.9 Africa
4 Jamaica 52.1 LAC
5 Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of) 49 LAC
6 Belize 41.7 LAC
7 Guatemala 41.4 LAC
8 US Virgin Islands 39.2 LAC
9 Saint Kitts and Nevis 38.2 LAC
10 Zambia 38 Africa
By way of comparison to homicide rates in developed countries, in 2011 the rate in the
US was 5.0, Belgium 1.7, Canada, 1.8, New Zealand 1.5, the UK (England and Wales) 1.2, and
Australia 1.2. 6 Even in comparison to many other developing countries, the homicide rates in
Latin America are striking. For example, the homicide rate in India is 3.4, Bangladesh 2.7,
South Korea 2.9, China 1.1, and Singapore 0.5. While other crime rates are also high (e.g.,
robbery, breaking and entering, rape, assault), massive under-reporting problems and variable
data collection methods render data for these crimes much less reliable and comparable than for
homicide statistics (although these are not entirely free from reliability issues). Law and order
problems are consistently ranked as the leading concern of many Latin Americans in public
opinion surveys.7
In addition to human losses and intangible injuries (such as psychological trauma),
violence causes significant economic losses associated with “healthcare costs, other institutional
costs, private insurance costs, and material losses.”8 As a proportion of GDP, these costs are
6
Ibid.
7
Mark Ungar, “Latin America’s Police: Advancing Citizen Security?”, (paper presented at the Violence and
Citizenship in Post-Authoritarian Latin America Conference, Princeton, New Jersey, March 7, 2008), 2.
8
Roberto Briceño-León, Andrés Villaveces, and Alberto Concha-Eastman, “Understanding the uneven distribution
of the incidence of homicide in Latin America,” International Journal of Epidemiology 37, (2008): 755.
3
estimated at 3.6% for Mexico, 6.4% for Colombia, and 6.7% for Guatemala.9 The negative
effect of high homicide rates on life expectancy is also thought to reduce planning horizons and
detract from optimal levels of saving and investment.10
These trends stand in striking contrast to the optimism engendered by the wave of
democratization that has rolled through Latin America in the last three decades. In 1977, in
Latin America itself, only Colombia, Costa Rica and Venezuela were democracies. Since that
time, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Ecuador, Honduras, Bolivia, Argentina, El Salvador,
Uruguay, Brazil, Guatemala, Chile, Paraguay, Haiti, Nicaragua, Panama, and Mexico have all
moved to (at least nominally) democratic political regimes, superseding previous military or
autocratic political regimes, or in some cases (such as Guatemala) as the culmination of extended
civil wars.11 The optimism engendered by this wave of democratization was in part predicated
on assumptions that democratic political regimes were likely to address more effectively some of
the underlying sources of inequality and grievances in countries in the region, as well as
heralding the end of the deployment of violent forms of repression by military or autocratic
governments.12
It was also assumed that police forces that had often been conscripted or enlisted in aid of
the maintenance of military or autocratic governments and were often a major agent of
repression, violence and human rights abuses, would, in the new democratic era, rapidly be
transformed into more conventional civil police forces, charged with maintaining law and order
9
Ibid.
10
Soares and Naritomi, “Understanding High Crime Rates in Latin America,” 20.
11
Michael Reid, Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America’s Soul (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2007), 120-121.
12
Enrique Desmond Arias and Daniel Goldstein, ed. Violent Democracies in Latin America (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010), 2; Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, "Governo Democrático, violência e Estado (ou não) de direito", in
Brasil: fardo do passado, promessa do future, ed. Leslie Bethell (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2002), 237-
270; Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, "The Paradox of Democracy in Brazil", The Brown Journal of World Affairs 7, no. 2
(2002): 113-122.
4
and serving and protecting the legitimate security interests of citizens, while respecting their
basic civil and political rights.13 Most of these assumptions have proven unfounded in many (but
not all) countries in Latin America, where police abuse and violence have in many cases actually
been rising since the emergence of democratic political regimes.14
In this paper, we seek to explore the challenges to effective policing in what have been
characterized in many cases as “violent Latin American democracies.”15 This expression
captures the idea that conventional typologies of political regimes do not seem to capture the
problems associated with state and interpersonal violence that characterizes many Latin
American democracies today. The most extreme argument is that “if one considers violence as a
measure of democratic failure – with greater levels of violence indicating a breakdown of
democratic institutions and values – then Latin American democracies could be considered
profoundly undemocratic.”16 A less extreme version of this argument claims that such high
levels of violence and insecurity contradict a democratic ideal of peace and these countries
should therefore be described as imperfect or incomplete democracies.17 Despite their
differences, both versions of this argument share one thing in common: they assume that there is
something deficient with democratic regimes with such high levels of violence and, therefore,
Latin America has not yet completed its democratic transition.
13
Anthony Pereira and Mark Ungar, “The Persistence of Mano Dura: Authoritarian Legacies and Policing in Brazil
and the Southern Cone,” in Authoritarian Legacies and Democracy in Latin America and Southern Europe, ed. Hite
and Cesarini. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 263.
14
Pereira and Ungar, “The Persistence of Mano Dura: Authoritarian Legacies and Policing in Brazil and the
Southern Cone,”1; Arias and Goldstein, Violent Democracies in Latin America, 263-266. It is important to note,
however, that some of the most violent countries are the ones that are longstanding democracies (e.g., Colombia &
Jamaica).
15
Enrique Arias and Daniel Goldstein, Violent Democracies in Latin America.
16
Ibid, 2.
17
John Bailey and Roy Godson, Organized Crime & Democratic Governability: Mexico and the U.S.-Mexican
Borderlands (Pittsburgh University Press, 2000); Otwin Marenin, “Changing police, policing change: some thematic
questions,” in Changing police, policing change: International Perspectives, ed. Otwin Marenin (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1996); John Gledhill, Power and Its Disguises: Anthropological Perspectives on Politics
(London: Pluto Press, 2000).
5
In addition to being important for democracy, effective policing should be an essential
part of rule of law reforms. We share with other commentators18 the view that both domestic and
international proponents of rule of law reform in developing countries face an under-
acknowledged challenge of rendering rule of law reform politically salient to most citizens of
these countries in their daily lives. Very few citizens, over the course of their lifetimes, are
likely to have any involvement in the formal court system, but many, on a daily basis, will face
law and order issues where the policing function is of critical importance to them. In sum, police
reform should be viewed as an essential part of the rule of law agenda in any country. Moreover,
rule of law seems particularly important in democratic transitions in Latin America (and
elsewhere). According to O’Donnell, “[t]he rule of law is among the essential pillars upon which
any high-quality democracy rests”.19 In the absence of the rule of law, which guarantees full and
equal legal protection to all, formally democratic states (i.e., those with regular elections and
formal structures of democratic governance) lack many qualities that guarantee not only
political, but also many other forms of social and economic engagement.20
The central question of this paper is what kind of reforms are necessary to guarantee that
Latin American police forces meet what Bayley calls “the democratic criteria”: 1) police are
accountable to law, not to government; 2) police protect human rights, including those related to
democratic participation; 3) there are constraints on the use of police force that are enforced by
18
For examples of commentators who share our view, see Thomas Carothers, “The Rule of Law Revival,” Foreign
Affairs 7 (1998): 95; Stephen Golub, “A House without Foundation,” in Promoting the Rule of Law Abroad: In
Search of Knowledge, ed. Thomas Carothers (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
2006); Bryant Garth, “Building Strong and Independent Judiciaries for the New Law and Development: Beyond the
Paradox of Consensus Programs and Perpetually Disappointing Results,” DePaul Law Review 52 (2002): 383;
Michael Trebilcock and Ronald Daniels, Rule of Law Reform and Development: Charting the Fragile Path of
Progress (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2008), 355; Brian Tamanaha, On the Rule of Law: History, Politics, Theory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
19
Guillermo O’Donnell, “Why the Rule of Law Matters,” Journal of Democracy 15, no. 4 (2004): 42.
20
Teresa Caldeira and James Holston, “Democracy and Violence in Brazil,” Comparative Studies in Society and
History 41, no. 4 (1999).
6
institutions external to the police force; 4) the police force’s priority is the protection of citizens
as individuals and private groups, not the state.21
We acknowledge that in any discussion of police reform it is difficult to avoid broader
issues relating to effective policing methods. Police reform is intrinsically linked with a concern
with reducing crime rates. However, police effectiveness in fighting crime engages a much
larger and more complex legal, political, social and economic matrix and its success depends in
part on the nature of the interactions between reforms to the police and other elements in the
matrix. The complexity of this topic and its multifaceted approach does not allow us to deal with
it in this short paper. The primary focus of this paper is to discuss the types of reforms that
ensure that a police force is abiding by the most fundamental principles of the rule of law under a
democratic regime. We recognize that in some cases the two problems are so entangled that it is
not possible to discuss police reform without addressing effective ways to reduce crime.
However, as we argue in the paper, this is not always the case. In many countries it seems
possible to separate the two.
The restricted focus of our analysis (reforms that ensure that a police force operates
according to basic principles of the rule of law in a democratic society) does not imply that one
should ignore the complex institutional interdependencies22 between the police force and other
institutions that operate in Latin American democracies. For example, meeting Bayley’s
democratic criteria depends on an effective prosecutorial function and effective disposition of
cases by the judicial system, and effective correctional institutions and policies. Yet given the
significant obstacles to across-the-board reforms of their entire set of legal institutions
21
David H. Bayley, Changing the Guard: Developing Democratic Police Abroad (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2006).
22
Mariana Mota Prado and Michael Trebilcock, “Path Dependence, Development, and the Dynamics of Institutional
Reform,” University of Toronto Law Journal 59 (2009).
7
simultaneously, we believe that there is merit in isolating policing, a function that affects the
daily lives of citizens, for more detailed analysis.
The paper will be structured as follows: Part II will present the “democratic criteria” for
police forces and assess if and how actual policing in Latin America deviates from these
“democratic criteria”, offering a typology of the different types of deviation. Based on the
typology presented in Part II and an analysis of successful and failed reforms, Part III will
discuss what kinds of reform strategies could be successful in different countries in the region.
The paper concludes with some lessons that may be useful to Latin American and other middle-
income developing countries.
II. THE STATE OF POLICING IN LATIN AMERICA
a. The Aspiration: Democratic Policing
The idea that the police should play a crucial role in protecting human rights and assuring
equal treatment of citizens was endorsed in 1979 by the United Nations Code of Conduct for
Law Enforcement and has been acknowledge in prior academic writings.23 This ideal police
force has been labeled “democratic policing” and its essential characteristic is the fact that it is
accountable to law rather than to government. 24
Democratic policing is especially relevant for countries in transition. In many developing
countries, a politicized police force has historically acted against citizens, whether as a tool of
the Communist Party, an authoritarian government, or a colonizing government. In these cases,
the police were alienated from citizens because of their exclusive focus on securing social order
23
Trebilcock and Daniels, Rule of Law Reform and Development, 110; H. Goldstein, Policing a Free Society
(Cambridge: MAL Ballinger, 1977); Peter K. Manning, “The Study of Policing,” Police Quarterly 8, no. 1 (2005):
23.
24
Bayley, Changing the Guard, 19-22.
8
and defending ruling interests.25 In Latin America, this legacy has produced a misconception of
the role of the police that “blinds them to the simple perception that the police are citizens, as are
those with whom they work, and that there is no enemy.”26 In this context, democratic policing
can impact positively on the transition to democracy directly or indirectly. Directly, “it would be
contradictory to say that a country was democratic if its police arbitrarily arrested people, used
unreasonable force, and suppressed political dissent.”27 Indirectly, police can secure the
processes that are essential to democratic life, such as voting, speaking, and assembling.28 As a
consequence, democratic policing is a necessary (but not sufficient) step in the transition to a
democratic regime.29
While democratic policing is essential for the existence of a democratic regime, the term
democratic policing is not reserved for or circumscribed to democratic countries. Democratic
policing is easier to achieve in a political democracy,30 but is also a valuable model to follow
even in non-democratic countries. Increasing transparency and accountability can limit the most
egregious human rights violations and espouse benchmarks to which the reform process can
aspire.31 Thus, discussions of democratic policing (and reforms to implement it) do not
presuppose or require a fully functional democratic regime.
A potential argument against democratic policing is the popular perception in Latin
America – even among police officers – that the police are more effective in ensuring public
25
Attannibi E.O. Alemika, “Police Policing and Rule of Law in Transitional Countries,” in Human Rights and the
Police in Transitional Countries, ed. Lone Lindholt et al. (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2003), 74.
26
Paul Chevigny, “Defining the Role of the Police in Latin America,” in The (Un)Rule of Law and the
Underpriviliged in Latin America, ed. Juan E. Mendez et al. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999),
49.
27
Bayley, Changing the Guard, 18.
28
Ibid.
29
Ibid.
30
David Bayley, Democratizing the Police Abroad: What to Do and How to Do It (Washington: US Department of
Justice, 2001), 13.
31
Trebilcock and Daniels, Rule of Law Reform and Development, 110.
9
safety by violating human rights and infringing the rule of law (so called mano dura).32 The
counter-arguments against this perception are manifold. First, empirical evidence suggests that
violating the rule of law contributes only marginally to deterrence.33 Second, these violations are
likely to make the job of the police harder, as it alienates the public and reduces citizen’s
willingness to cooperate with the police.34 Third, these violations may further undermine rule of
law institutions, as lawless behavior constitutes a missed opportunity for rule of law institutions
to mature and develop.35 Finally, there is no guarantee that the abuses that victimize criminals
will not also be used against innocent citizens. As Paul Chevigny states, a “society cannot obtain
‘security’ through police lawlessness, precisely because it is lawless.”36
b. The Reality: Non‐democratic Policing
Latin America is a region that defies broad generalizations, as the differences and
peculiarities among its fifty37 countries are numerous. Policing is not an exception.38
Nevertheless, policing in Latin American countries suffers from many serious and relatively
common problems. In many countries, police forces are militarized and hierarchical, reflecting
the practices of former authoritarian regimes and focusing on responsive rather than preventive
32
David Bayley, “Law Enforcement and the Rule of Law: Is there a Tradeoff?”, Criminology & Public Policy 2, no.
1 (2002): 136.
33
Ibid., 138; Niels Uildriks, “Policing Insecurity and Police Reform in Mexico City,” in Policing Insecurity, ed.
Niels Uildriks (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009).
34
Bayley, “Law Enforcement and the Rule of Law: Is there a Tradeoff?”, 138; Uildriks, “Policing Insecurity and
Police Reform in Mexico City.”
35
Paul Chevigny, “Defining the Role of the Police in Latin America,” 111.
36
Ibid.
37
By Latin America, we are referring to what the United Nations Statistical Division calls the Latin American and
Caribbean region, which includes the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. For a complete list, please
see United Nations Statistical Division, “Composition of macro geographical (continental) regions, geographical
sub-regions, and selected economic and other groupings,” United Nations Statistical Division, last modified
September 20, 2011, http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49regin.htm.
38
Jose Miguel Cruz, “Police Abuse in Latin America”, AmericasBarometer Insights 11, (2009). Available at
www.americasbarometer.org, showing that in 2008 the percentage of people who reported having suffered some for
of abuse by the police in the last twelve months was above 7% in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia and El Salvador,
whereas it was around or below 3% in Venezuela, Costa Rica, Honduras, Paraguay and Panama. The number and
scope of police reforms also varies significantly from country to country, as we will discuss below.
10
measures. 39 Corruption is endemic and often facilitates the relationship between police and
powerful drug cartels, undermining attempts at reforming the police and other complementary
institutions. 40 Police abuse and extra-judicial killings are common.41 Finally, many police
agencies lack essential human and material resources.42
Faced with extremely high crime rates and ineffective public police forces, wealthier
Latin American citizens have been increasingly relying on private security services, including
hiring bodyguards, moving to gated communities, and even buying bullet-proof cars. While the
ratio between private security guards and police officers in developed countries runs generally at
2 to 1, in some Latin American countries the ratio has increased to 11 to 1. Many private
security forces are unregistered and operate in the informal sector without effective state
oversight (and are often partly staffed by moonlighting police officers). One consequence of this
trend is that it creates a major political economy problem in that wealthier citizens are reluctant
to underwrite, through their taxes, improvements in public police forces, given that they have, in
many cases, effectively exited from public police protection.43 This leaves poor people
increasingly left to police themselves, which has in some countries led to an increase in self-help
39
Pereira and Ungar, “The Persistence of Mano Dura”, 268-269.
40
Diane Davis,“Undermining the Rule of Law: Democratization and the Dark Side of Police Reform in Mexico,”
Latin American Politics and Society 48, no. 1 (2008): 67.
41
Mark Ungar, “Latin America’s Police: Advancing Citizen Security?”; Ruth Stanley, “Living in a Jungle: State
Violence and Perceptions of Democracy in Buenos Aires,” in Violent Democracies in Latin America, ed. Enrique
Desmond Arias and Daniel M. Goldstein (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Anthony Pereira, “Public
Security, Private Interests, and Police Reform in Brazil,” in Democratic Brazil Revisited, ed. Peter Kingstone and
Timothy Power (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008); Daniel Brinks, “Informal Institutions and the
Rule of Law: The Judicial Response to State Killings in Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo in the 1990s,” Comparative
Politics 36, no. 1 (2003): 6-7.
42
Theodore Leggett, Crime and Development in Central America: Caught in the Crossfire, United Nations Office
on Drugs and Crime, 2007, 31. Indicating that in countries like Honduras and Guatemala, the problem is a low ratio
of police to public; Soares and Naritomi. “Understanding High Crime Rates in Latin America”; David A. Shirk and
Alejandra Rios Cázares, “Introduction: Reforming the Administration of Justice in Mexico,” in Reforming the
Administration of Justice in Mexico, ed. Wayne A. Cornelius and David A. Shirk (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2007), 20.
43
See Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970).
11
forms of protection, including delegation of security to drug gangs, vigilantism, and community
lynchings.44
With such a long list of problems, it is apparent that Latin America fails to meet the
democratic policing criteria.45 With rampant corruption in many countries that goes unpunished,
many police agencies are accountable to neither government nor the law. Instead, in countries
like Peru, Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil, and Jamaica (by no means an exhaustive list) the police
are bought off by drug gangs on a regular basis.46 This is coupled with the fact that there is a dire
lack of external accountability. In the countries where there is civilian oversight over the police,
regulators and ombudsmen lack effective authority to hold the agency to account. 47 Those
holding these positions are frequently placed there as a result of political patronage. With few
exceptions, investigations into officer misconduct are conducted internally and rarely result in
serious punishment.48
It is noteworthy that there are some important exceptions to regional trends. While
Chile’s Carabineros are hierarchical and militarized, the police force is renowned for its lack of
corruption. 49 Costa Rica is another country with a functional police force with a record for
44
See Jennifer L. Johnson, “When the Poor Police Themselves: Public Insecurity and Extralegal Criminal-Justice
Administration in Mexico,” Legitimacy and Criminal Justice: International Perspectives, ed. Tom Tyler (New
York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007); see more generally, Mariana Mota Prado, A Tragedy of the Privates: Private
Security Services in Latin America, Paper prepared for the SELA Conference, June 2010, Santiago, Chile. Available
at http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/sela/MatoPrado_Eng_CV_20100420.pdf.
45
Mercedes S. Hinton, “A distant reality: democratic policing in Argentina and Brazil,” Criminal Justice 5, no. 1
(2005): 95.
46
George Henry Millard, “Drugs and Corruption in Latin America,” Dickinson Journal of International Law 15
(1996):534-535; BBC News, “Humala sacks Peru police commanders in corruption purge,” BBC News, October 11,
2011, accessed November 23, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-15250508; Leggett, “Crime
and Development in Central America,” 17-18; John P. Sullivan and Robert J. Bunker, “Drug Cartels, Street Gangs,
and Warlords,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 13, no. 2 (2002): 45-47; Davis, “Undermining the Rule of Law,” 73.
47
Pereira, “Public Security, Private Interests, and Police Reform in Brazil.”
48
Sandro Cabral, Sergio Lazzarini, and Allan Claudius Barbosa, “Monitorando a Polícia: Um Estudo sobre a
Eficácia dos Processos Administrativos Envolvendo Policiais Civis na Corregedoria Geral da Bahia,” Organizações
& Sociedade 15 no. 47 (2008).
49
Lucia Dammert. “Police and Judicial Reform in Chile,” in Policing Insecurity: Police Reform, Security, and
Human Rights in Latin America, ed. Niels A. Uildriks (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009), 152.
12
respecting human rights.50 Both these countries have relatively lower levels of police abuse than
other countries in the region.51 Despite these notable successes, however, it remains clear that
there is still a widespread failure of policing to meet democratic criteria across the region.
c. The Problem: Types of Deviations from the Democratic Criteria
Policing in Latin America is so rife with problems that it requires some reframing of the
democratic criteria for us to effectively assess the nature of the problem. As currently
formulated, the democratic criteria presuppose a spectrum between authoritarian and democratic
policing. The requirement that police be accountable to law, not government, implicitly assumes
that the police are accountable to one of the two. However, in many Latin Americas countries
the police have become less authoritarian without becoming more democratic. In countries like
Mexico, for instance, the police are accountable to drug traffickers. In other countries, like
Argentina, the government is simply unable to control the police, who operate by their own rules.
Consequently, an autocratic police force is only one of many different ways that police agencies
can deviate from the democratic criteria.
In an attempt to facilitate the diagnosis of different problems and outline potential policy
proposals to solve these problems, we will use ideal types.52 These ideal types will indicate
different types of deviation from these democratic criteria and are three fold. The first type is the
autocratic police force, which plays a large role in the concern with police reform in countries
that are transitioning from military or autocratic rule to democratic rule, as many Latin American
50
Q.A.M. Eijkman, “We are Here to Serve You! Public Security, Police Reform and Human Rights Implementation
in Costa Rica” (PhD diss., Utrecht University, 2007), 2.
51
Cruz, “Police Abuse in Latin America.” Indicating that as a percentage of population reporting police abuse in
the last twelve months, Costa Rica had 3.6% and Chile 4%. For a comparison, see Note 38 above.
52
A similar conceptual exercise was used to discuss policing in the Post-Soviet Union, which is described as having
predatory policing. See Theodore Gerber and Sarah Mendelson, “Public Experience of Police Violence and
Corruption in Contemporary Russia: A Case of Predatory Policing?” Law & Society Review 42, no. 1 (2008).
13
countries were in the late 1970s and 1980s.53 The autocratic police is controlled by and
protective of the interests of a repressive regime.
There are at least two other types of deviation from the democratic criteria that seem to
be present in Latin America, but do not seem to be captured by the concept of autocratic police.
There are countries in which the police forces seem to have moved away from the autocratic
police form, but instead of becoming democratic, they have become controlled by drug gangs.
We call this type the criminal police. Alternatively some police forces become unaccountable
and uncontrollable institutions that set their own policies and execute them independently of the
state. We call this type the autarkic police.
Despite exhibiting important differences, the three deviations from the democratic police
outlined above (autocratic, criminal and autarkic) have one thing in common: they are not
accountable to the law. They also lack other characteristics of the democratic police force, such
as respect for human rights, protection of civil and political rights, accountability to people
outside the organization, and servicing the needs of citizens.
We propose here that all the characteristics of each ideal-type of police force are directly
derived from a principal-agent relationship. For example, the criminal police violate human
rights for criminal motives (i.e. to protect the interests of criminals who pay the police for
protection), whereas the autarkic police violate human rights for ideological motives (they truly
believe that mano dura is the best crime-fighting strategy). In these cases, the principals are,
respectively, criminal groups and the police itself. In the case of the democratic police, in turn,
53
Nathan W Pino and Michael D. Wiatrowski, “Assessing the Obstacles,” in Democratic policing in transitional and
developing countries, ed. Nathan Pino and Michael D. Wiatrowski (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2006),
31; Hugo Fruhling. “Recent Police Reform in Latin America” in Policing Insecurity, ed. Niels Uildriks (Lanham:
Lexington Books, 2009), 23.
14
the principals are the citizens of the democratic polity, and their rights and interests are the ones
protected by the police force.
The table below illustrates, respectively, the principal, the additional accountability
mechanism and the expected behavioural outcome in the cases of the autocratic, criminal and
autarkic police forces.54
IDEAL Democratic Autocratic Criminal Police Autarkic Police
TYPE Police Police
Principal Citizens Ruling political Criminal Themselves
party Organizations
External Accountable to Accountable only Accountable to
Not accountable
accountability people outside to people inside people outside of
to people outside
their organization their organization their organization,
of their
who are but nullifying this
organization or
specifically accountability by
accountable to
designated and posing threats to
people who lack
empowered to or bribing those in
power and
regulate police charge of influence to
activity controlling police
effectively
activity regulate police
activity
Human Protective of Violate human Violate human Violate human
Rights human rights rights for political rights for criminal rights for
motives motives ideological
motives
Civil and Especially Violate civil and Indifferent to civil Can either behave
Political protective of civil political rights to and political as the autocratic
Rights and political suppress political rights required for or as the criminal
rights required for activity that can participation in a police, depending
participation in a be threatening to democratic system on the legacy of
democratic the regime the authoritarian
system period
Mode of Servicing the Servicing the Servicing the Servicing its own
operation needs of needs of the needs of private needs and
individual political group in criminal groups ideologies.
citizens and control of
legitimate private government
groups
54
This table is meant to reflect ideal types in Latin America only. A more complete table would need to include
predatory policing, which has been acknowledged in the literature as an ideal type that correctly describes policing
in Russia. See Note 52 above.
15
While no force will perfectly correspond to any one ideal type, the Mexican Federal
Police is a good example of the Criminal Police, as many of the police officers work for the drug
cartels and protect their trafficking routes rather than enforce the law. The Jamaican
Constabulary Force (JCF) shares many characteristics of an Autarkic force, since the JCF often
operates by its own rules – regularly killing suspects, taking bribes, abandoning prescribed patrol
routes to protect business interests – and the government is unable to control them or prevent
extra-judicial killings. The Chilean Carabineros are an excellent example of a police force that is
moving from Autocratic to Democratic as a result of reforms following the Pinochet
dictatorship.55 Since many countries have multiple levels of policing, different types of police
agencies can occur within one country. Despite these complexities, this typology is useful in
identifying types of reforms and assessing their effectiveness, as we will discuss further below.
III. POLICE REFORM IN LATIN AMERICA
A significant amount of financial, political and human resources has been invested in police
reform in Latin America. Over the past twenty years, reform efforts have been made in
Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and other countries in the region.56 However, most of these
past reform efforts have failed to create effective democratic policing.57 Failure of institutional
reforms often occurs because reforms do not account for the particularities of each country, its
55
For a long time their operations were coordinated by the Ministry of the Interior but were formally under the
Ministry of Defence. In early 2011 they were officially moved under the Minister of the Interior and Public Security
(no longer the Minister of Defence). They have widespread popular support and have high levels of legitimacy,
despite being still very militarized. See Hugo Fruhling, “Police Legitimacy in Chile” in Legitimacy and Criminal
Justice: International Perspectives, ed. Tom Tyler (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007), 115.
56
Niels Uildriks, Policing Insecurity (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009); Joseph Tulchin and Meg Ruthenburg,
Toward a Society Under Law (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Press, 2006); John Mclean et al., “Jamaica –
Community Based Policing Assessment,” Jamaican Constabulary Force and USAID, 2008.
57
Trebilcock and Daniels, Rule of Law Reform and Development, 119-124.
16
historical legacies and the distinct causes of what may look like relatively common problems.58
In this regard, our typology may help reformers to understand some of the central and starker
differences between countries, and to design strategies that are adapted to each particular
context.
In developing this analysis, this paper will focus on Latin American countries that have
transitioned from an autocratic to a democratic regime, excluding the cases of uninterrupted
democracies such as Colombia and Costa Rica. The lack of an authoritarian past and a period of
democratic transition make these two cases rather distinct from the ones analyzes here. Also, we
will not discuss reforms that created new police forces from scratch, following armed conflict
and humanitarian crises, as was the case of Guatemala, Haiti and El Salvador. Instead, our focus
will be those countries that have gone through a democratic transition but did not have a
“window of opportunity” to promote all encompassing reforms.59
Scholars have suggested that Latin American countries that did not have the option to “start
over”, such as Guatemala, Haiti and El Salvador, can learn from each other’s reform efforts.60
There are, indeed, many commonalities in the region that may be fruitfully explored by
reformers. However, this paper will emphasize the differences among these cases, indicating
how each country’s context often requires a different reform strategy. More specifically, we will
argue that there is a certain sequence that reformers should follow in order to increase the
58
For a more detailed articulation of the idea that institutional reforms in developing countries need to be adapted to
the context and cannot be based on blue prints, see Michael Trebilcock and Mariana Mota Prado, What Makes Poor
Countries Poor? Institutional Determinants of Development (Cheltanham: Edward Elgar, 2011).
59
For an explanation of the concept of window of opportunity, and how path dependence impose significant
obstacles to all encompassing radical reforms, see Mariana Mota Prado and Michael Trebilcock, “Path Dependence,
Development, and the Dynamics of Institutional Reform,” University of Toronto Law Journal 59, (2009).
60
Heather H. Ward, Police Reform in Latin America: Brazil, Argentina and Chile, in Toward a Society under Law:
Citizens and their Police in Latin America, ed. Joseph S. Tulchin and Meg Ruthenburg (Washington: Woodrow
Wilson Press Centre, 2006).
17
changes of success of police reform.61 More specifically, reformers should first guarantee that a
specific group is not controlling the police force and using it for its own benefits (the principal-
agent problem). Second, reformers should promote accountability, starting with the most basic
mechanisms of accountability, moving to more complex ones only when the basic ones are in
place. Third, in certain countries, reformers may need to bypass existing institutions, including
the police force, to promote effective reforms. We explore each of these in turn.
a. Independence: Dealing with the Principal‐Agent Problem
The ideal types of autarkic, criminal or autocratic police force help reformers identify the
different reasons why police forces are deviating from the democratic criteria and, therefore,
should help them design the most desirable strategies to effectively promote democratic policing
in each of these particular cases. We start our analysis with the cases in which a specific group
has control over the police force and uses it as an instrument to protect its interests. This is the
case of autocratic and criminal policing.
In such cases, reformers will need to start reforms by dealing with the principal-agent
problem. Internal and external reforms, such as recruitment, training, and punishment for
corruption and human rights abuses, are unlikely to be effective, if the principal-agent problem is
not dealt with first. Consider, for example, the case of criminal police. Where drug cartels are
controlling the police force, any attempts to establish independent ombudsmen or civilian
oversight, or to invoke the courts to prosecute corrupt police officers is met with fierce and
sometimes violent resistance from the police and the cartels, which have strong incentives to
61
On the importance of sequencing, and for an argument against all encompassing reforms, see Prado and
Trebilcock, “Path Dependence, Development, and the Dynamics of Institutional Reform.”
18
protect their financial interests. Attempts to reform the police in Mexico City in the 1990s
suffered from these problems.62
Dealing with the principal-agent problem does not necessarily mean effectively moving
from a criminal police (where drug gangs are the principals) to democratic policing (where the
citizens are the principals). As we will discuss in the next section, establishing citizens as the
principals may be one of the last (if not the very last) move in a well-designed sequencing of
reforms. Instead, dealing with the principal-agent problem in this case means eliminating the
existing principal, so as to at least open up the possibility of contemplating some of the other
reforms that could and should ensue.
In this regard, it is necessary to distinguish between control and accountability of police
forces.63 In the cases of the criminal and the autocratic police force, the principal is the institution
that has control over the police force, i.e. it can dictate what a police force can and cannot do,
and can effectively use the police force to protect its own interests. Accountability, in contrast, is
a system to effectively enforce rules and norms, which is normally backed-up by an effective
system of rewards and sanctions. Control and accountability often undermine each other. Indeed,
securing the independence of the police is widely acknowledged in the literature as an important
step in creating democratic policing.64 We argue that eliminating control and securing
independence should be the primary concern in cases in which the group that controls the police
force (the principal) is likely to undermine attempts to establish effective mechanism of
62
Uildriks, “Policing Insecurity and Police Reform in Mexico City.”
63
Philip Stenning, “The idea of the Political ‘Independence’ of the Police: International Interpretations and
Experiences,” in Police and Government Relations: Who’s Calling the Shots?, ed. Margaret E. Beare and Tonita
Murray (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).
64
For a brief overview of the literature on police independence, see Trebilcock and Daniels, Rule of Law Reform
and Development, 112-115.
19
accountability. Indeed, attempts to establish accountability in such cases are likely to fail if the
principal-agent problem is not tackled first.
In the specific case of the criminal police, for instance, attempts to make officers comply
with the rule of law are likely to be undermined by the corrupting influence of the drug gangs
and/or other criminal groups.65 The control of the police force by criminal groups creates strong
incentives for police officers to act according to criminal interests, not according to the rule of
law. Indeed, Sabet makes the point that an upstanding police officer is just as vulnerable to
threats of physical harm from the drug cartels as a corrupt officer. When presented with the
choice of taking a bribe or receiving a credible death threat from the cartels, even a professional,
well-trained officer has a strong incentive to break the law.66 In such cases, where officers are
coerced by the principal into breaking the law, dealing with the principal-agent problem becomes
key. Thus, in the cases of the criminal police, reforms need first to eliminate the control of
criminal groups over the police force.
In such cases, it is very likely that external reforms to eliminate the old principal, such as
military action against drug gangs,67 will bolster attempts at establishing a democratic police
force. A clear example of reforms in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (supported by the state and
federal governments) was the installation of Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora, UPPs
65
An example is from Rio de Janeiro is judge Patrícia Acioli, who was recently murdered in what was widely
believed to be retaliation for her tough stance against corruption and police involvement in drug gangs, see Amnesty
International,“Killing of Brazilian judge exposes police corruption,” Amnesty International, August 16, 2011,
accessed October 28, 2011, http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/police-suspected-armed-ambush-killed-
brazilian-judge-2011-08-16.
66
Daniel Sabet, “Police Reform in Mexico: Advances and Persistent Obstacles.” In Shared Responsibility, ed. Eric
L. Olson, Robert A. Donnelly, and David A. Shirk (Washington: Mexico Institute, 2010), 268.
67
Countries such as Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico have to dismantle criminal organizations by capturing,
imprisoning and killing drug lords and criminal leaders, and by using military occupation of areas controlled by drug
trafficking, see The Economist, “Shifting Sands: Mexico’s changing drug war,” The Economist, November 26,
2011, accessed February 15, 2012, http://www.economist.com/node/21540289; The Economist, “Conquering
Complexo do Alemão,” The Economist, December 2, 2010, accessed March 2, 2012,
http://www.economist.com/node/17627963; The Economist “Drugs, war and democracy: A survey of Colombia,”
The Economist, April 19, 2001, accessed March 2, 2012, http://www.economist.com/node/576197.
20
(Pacification Police Units). Using new recruits, financial incentives, and different training (police
as public officers serving the community, instead of coercion agents), these new units occupy
regions formerly dominated by drug dealing organized networks, after these have been expelled
from the territory by a highly-trained special unit (BOPE) or in some cases by the army.68
Numerous aspects of such reforms contributed to its success, as we discuss in section c infra, but
it is important to note that they were preceded by an attempt to remove the older principal
(criminal groups).
The problem is that eliminating the criminal principal is an exceedingly difficult process,
and often has been associated with major civilian casualties, and raised a number of concerns
with human rights violations.69 In Brazil, UPPs have tried to avoid violent confrontation
between police officers and criminals by announcing in advance the day of military occupation
of a certain region (known as favelas). This allows criminals to flee before the police force or the
army arrives. However, this strategy has been criticized for allowing criminal groups to simply
relocate to other areas.70 Along the same lines, such crime elimination and prevention policies
may have negative or positive impacts in attempts to establish successful police reforms across
national borders. For instance, the destruction of drug cartels in one country may simply lead to
the rise of cartels in another. For instance, the military crackdown on the Colombian drug cartels
68
Stephanie Gimenez Stahlberg, “The Pacification of Favelas in Rio de Janeiro: Why the Program is Working and
What are the Lessons for Other Countries”, Paper presented at the Conference Violence, Drugs and Governance:
Mexican Security in Comparative Perspective, Oganized by CDDRL, CISAC, FSI Stanford, Stanford, October 3-4,
2011, 8-9. Available at http://iis-db.stanford.edu/evnts/6716/Stahlberg,_Stephanie_-
_Pacification_of_Favelas_in_Rio_de_Janeiro_(Work_in_Progress).pdf.
69
The Economist, “Taking on the gangs,” The Economist, August 27, 2011, accessed August 9, 2011,
http://www.economist.com/node/21526903; Anne-Marie O’Connor and William Booth, “Torture surges in
Mexico’s drug war, rights group says,” The Washington Post, November 9, 2011, accessed March 18, 2012,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/americas/torture-surges-in-mexicos-drug-war-rights-group-
says/2011/11/09/gIQAphSI6M_story.html.
70
Stahlberg, “The Pacification of Favelas in Rio de Janeiro: Why the Program is Working and What are the Lessons
for Other Countries,” 9.
21
reduced crime in Colombia, but contributed to increased violence in Mexico.71 As Mexico
attempted its own military crackdown on its cartels in the last few years, drug activity and
violence spread to other Central American countries.72 As an alternative, Latin American
political leaders and public intellectuals have suggested that drug decriminalization may be the
most effective strategy to tackle this problem in Latin American.73 However, this proposal still
face significant political resistance in Latin America and around the world.74
Because these policies are not police reforms per ser, but general crime strategies to
reduce crime, they are beyond the scope of this paper. Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize
that, depending on how they are conducted, such military interventions may be taken as
examples of the effectiveness of mano dura policies, reducing popular and police support for
democratic reforms in the future. Thus, these tactics create the risk that after the removal of the
old principal, there will be support for reforms that make the police authoritarian or autarkic,
instead of democratic.
b. Accountability: Chosing the Right Sequence
Democratic policing, as an ideal type, has the citizens as the principals. In contrast, the
autocratic police force is controlled by the ruling party, the criminal police by criminal groups,
71
Davis, “Undermining the Rule of Law.”
72
Rory Carroll, “Guatemala becomes killing field as drug wars spread through Central America,” The Guardian,
June 28, 2011, accessed March 18, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/28/guatemala-town-mexico-
narco-wars.
73
Los Angeles Times, Editorial, “Legalize drugs? It's a valid discussion for U.S., Mexico and others”, April 15,
2012 (indicating that the Presidents of Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico have proposed decriminalization as an
alternative to the war on drugs in the Summit of the Americas). See also, The Latin American Commission on Drugs
and Democracy, Drugs and Democracy: toward a paradigm shift (2009) (Advocating for the decriminalization of
drug use. The report is endorsed by former presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, César Gaviria of
Colombia and Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico and composed of 17 independent personalities). Available at
www.drogasedemocracia.org/Arquivos/declaracao_ingles_site.pdf.
74
The Economist, “Burn-out and battle fatigue: As violence soars, so do voices of dissent against drug prohibition”
Mar 17th 2012.
22
and the autarkic police by nobody. In these three cases of non-democratic policing, ultimately
reformers should aspire to establish the citizens as principal of the police force. The question is
whether establishing citizens as principals should be the central concern in all reform efforts. The
answer is no.
While the principal-agent problem may be the central issue to be addressed in the case of
criminal police forces, efforts to remove the old principal (described in section a supra) should
not be immediately followed by efforts to establish the citizens as the new principals. The main
reason for this is path dependence. Path dependence theory helps us understand the obstacles to
institutional reforms, by providing important concepts such as self-reinforcing mechanisms and
switching costs.75 It explains, for instance, how actors operating in the current system are likely
to resist reforms that impose significant transitional costs for them to adapt to the new system
(switching costs). Also, path dependence illustrates how social norms can create an entrenched
institutional culture that sets up a behavioural pattern that is hard to change (self-reinforcing
mechanisms). These concepts suggests that radical departures from the status quo are likely to
face significant resistance, specially within the institution being reformed.
This is the reason why a country that has secured at least autarkic policing (i.e. the police
force is not controlled by criminal groups), should not necessarily attempt to establish all at once
all the pre-requisites for democratic policing, as described earlier. Most importantly, establishing
citizens as principals may be one of the most radical departures from the status quo among such
reforms, and is likely to face strong resistance. Therefore, establishing citizens as principals
should become more of a concern the closer an autarkic police force is to democratic policing. In
many countries, however, other concerns should be addressed before reformers turn their minds
75
Prado and Trebilcock, “Path Dependence, Development, and the Dynamics of Institutional Reform.”
23
to the principal-agent problem. In other words, in normal times, reformers are more likely to
succeed if they progressively implement reforms that move an autarkic police force closer to the
democratic criteria.
A certain police force may not have any of the features that define democratic policing or
it may have them all, but in most of the cases in Latin America police forces are somewhere in
between. The Chilean police force, for instance, can be described as a force that has very
effective mechanisms of internal accountability, as exemplified by the low levels of corruption
and lower levels of police abuse in comparison to other Latin American countries.76 However,
the Carabineros are still very militarized and lack external accountability. Moreover, despite
recent efforts to promote changes in this regard, they have resisted any type of civilian oversight
and reforms that create greater proximity between police officers and communities.77 Thus, the
Chilean police force cannot be considered a clear example of democratic policing, but it is closer
to the ideal type than other police forces in the region.
One central distinction that can be made, for instance, is that in Chile officers seems to
abide by laws and orders coming from officers in the chain of command. In contrast, in many
Latin American countries the police force does not even abide by the basic rules of the system.
The police, frustrated by dysfunctional prosecutorial, court, and correctional systems that they
believe hamper their efforts to address the crime problem, take the law into their own hands –
often with the support of many members of the public who believe in a rights/security
dichotomy. Attempts to implement internal reforms fail because they are often ignored by the
police agency. The police can be assigned to work with the community and establish consultative
processes, but they do not take these responsibilities seriously. Argentina is a good example. In
76
See notes 49 and 51 above.
77
Fruhling, “Police Legitimacy in Chile.”
24
Argentina, the Buenos Aires provincial police are autarkic, as they frequently act on their own
authority and cannot be controlled by the government.78 This is a case of autarkic police that is
further removed from the democratic policing than the Chilean case. As the Chilean case
suggests, the police force does not need to be effectively controlled by the citizens to be
accountable to the law. Thus, in many cases, one can focus on some more basic issues – such as
guaranteeing minimum respect for basic human rights and reducing the levels of corruption –
before one tries to establish a new principal.
In sum, the task of bringing Latin American police forces closer to the democratic criteria
requires one to start by identifying the ways in which a police force deviates from these criteria.
In other words, not only the criminal police requires a different reform strategy if compared to
the autarkic police force, but also autarkic police forces may deviate more or less from the
democratic criteria, requiring different reform strategies. To succeed, reformers need to be
sensitive to the particular problems in each country, designing a sequence of reforms that will
take these distinct starting points into consideration and gradually bring the police force closer to
the democratic criteria.
This is not to suggest that the sequencing of reforms is an entirely technical process. On
the contrary, there is an important political dimension in this process that is relevant, especially
in the case of autarkic police forces. On the one hand, autarkic police forces are likely to resist
externally imposed reforms. On the other hand, if left alone, these forces may never initiate
reforms or may promote them internally at a very slow pace and not necessarily favouring what
78
Mark Ungar, “Police Reform in Argentina: Public Security versus Human Rights” in Policing Insecurity, ed. Niels
Uildriks, (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009), 180. See also Matías Dewey, “Fragile states, robust structures: Illegal
Police Protection in Buenos Aires”, GIGA Working Paper No. 169. Hamburg: German Institute of Global and Area
Studies, Institute of Latin American Studies, June 2011. Available at http://www.giga-
hamburg.de/dl/download.php?d=/content/publikationen/pdf/wp169_dewey.pdf
25
citizens would prefer. This creates a dilemma for reformers: should they risk externally imposed
reforms that are likely to be strongly resisted, or should they wait for internal initiatives, that may
never come to fruition, or may be so isolated that they will not promote systemic changes?
This dilemma is illustrated by the contrasting cases of Argentina and Brazil. Attempts to
implement Community-based Policing (CBP) in the Argentinean province of Mendoza shows an
externally imposed reform that did not attract internal support and faced strong resistance from
police officers.79 Conversely, one of the earliest – and relatively successful CBP experiments in
the state of Rio de Janeiro were internally initiated reforms.80 However, this successful
experience covered a small area of the city – a low-income neighborhood known as favela – and
was never translated into systemic change. Indeed, colleagues often ostracized the officers
working on the project.81 Chile may be an example in which there is some combination between
external and internal support for reforms, but this means that only after two decades after the end
of the military dictatorship, reformers have started to slowly increase external accountability of
the Carabineros and have also tried some timid measures to create closer ties between the police
officers and the community.82
In addition to internal support for reforms, the external support also needs to be robust
and stable. The difficulties in aligning the interests of federal, state and local governments in a
federalist country like Brazil, Argentina and Mexico have imposed significant obstacles to police
79
Ungar, “Police Reform in Argentina: Public Security versus Human Rights,” 184-186.
80
Graziella Moraes D. Da Silva and Ignacio Cano, “Between Damage Reduction and Community Policing: The
Case of Pavão-Pavãozinho-Cantagalo in Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas,” in Legitimacy and Criminal Justice, ed.Tom
Tyler (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007).
81
Sergio Guimarães Ferreira, “Segurança Pública nas Grandes Cidades,” in Brasil: a Nova Agenda Social, ed. E.
Bacha and S. Schwartzman (Rio de Janeiro: Editora LTC, 2011), 298-299.
82
Ward, Police Reform in Latin America: Brazil, Argentina and Chile, 189-197 (describing the Plan Cuadrante).
Fruhling, “Police Legitimacy in Chile”, 125-127 (describing structural reforms).
26
reform.83 Similarly, lack of political stability may quickly change external support for reforms,
causing projects to collapse. An example is the failed attempt to reform the police in the province
of Buenos Aires. In response to rising crime and corruption in 1996, the provincial government
passed strong reforms including firing over 5,000 police officers, promoting Community Based
Policing via Neighbourhood Security Forums, and establishing new safeguards for privacy and
individual liberties.84 These all-encompassing reforms resulted in strong internal85 and external
resistance,86 as politicians and the members of the police force aligned to strongly oppose these
measures and dismantle reform efforts. The entire project collapsed.
The idea that reforms to implement accountability mechanisms can and should be
sequenced raises an important question about the end point of the reforms. As indicated earlier,
the final step in establishing democratic policing is to guarantee that citizens become the
principal of the police force. This is ensured through layers of accountability mechanisms that
will ultimately allow all citizens to control the force, thereby not allowing any particular citizen
or group of citizens to use the police force for its own benefit. In other words, democratic
policing mergers the concepts of control and accountability, as articulated by Maravall and
Przeworski:
Rule of law emerges when self-interested rulers willingly restrain themselves and make
their behaviour predictable in order to obtain sustained cooperation of well-organized
groups commanding valuable resources. In exchange for such cooperation, rulers will
protect the interests of these groups by legal means.87
83
Pereira, “Public Security, Private Interests, and Police Reform in Brazil.” Kent Eaton, “Paradoxes of Police
Reform: Federalism, Parties, and Civil Society in Argentina's Public Security Crisis”, Latin American Research
Review 43(3) (2008), 5-32.
84
Ungar, “Police Reform in Argentina: Public Security versus Human Rights”, 180-181.
85
Ward, Police Reform in Latin America: Brazil, Argentina and Chile, 189-197.
86
Fruhling, “Police Legitimacy in Chile”, 127-8 (contrasting Chile and Argentina). See also Eduardo Estevez,
“Public Security and Police Reform in the Province of Buenos Aires: Balancing Preventive and Investigative
Police", in Police Behavior: A Reform Approach, ed. G. Radha Kalyani (Amicus Books - Icfai University Press,
2008), 150-190.
87
Jose Maria Maravall and Adam Przeworski, ”Introduction,” in Democracy and the Rule of Law, ed. Jose Maria
Maravall and Adam Przeworski (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 2-4.
27
More to the point, as Holmes states:
Why do people with guns obey people without guns? (…) Societies may proximate the
rule of law if they consist of a larger number of power-wielding groups, comprising a
majority of the population, and if none of them become so strong as to be able thoroughly
to dominate the other. (…) Formulated differently, the balancing of many partialities is
the closest we can come to impartiality.88
These quotes explain how the idea of control (by citizens in a democratic polity) and
accountability (to the law) are intrinsically connected in the case of democratic policing. The
effective control of the police force by will be connected with accountability to the law, which is
connected to accountability to people outside the organization. The more accountability, the
more control there is, because all members of the community are interested in ensuring that no
other group is receiving some kind of privilege or benefit to which they are not entitled.
If the ideas of control and accountability are so interconnected, why not advocate for
reforms that promote both at the same time? Our proposal seeks to avoid recommending all-
encompassing reforms because they are riskier and reformers are likely to face significant
obstacles to their implementation. Instead, using the typology presented in the part two, we
propose a sequence of reforms that are adapted to the different problems faced by different
countries. The assumption is that reformers should establish a list of priorities (as opposed to
pursuing every single aspect of democratic policing at the same time) and define the optimal
sequencing of reforms according to the specific priorities of each country. In designing the
sequencing of reforms, reformers should not resort to formulas or blueprints. Different
initiatives are likely to work in different contexts.
88
Stephen Holmes, “Lineages of the rule of law” in Democracy and the Rule of Law, ed. Jose Maria Maravall and
Adam Przeworski (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
28
c. Bypassing Dysfunctional Institutions
Increasing accountability of autarkic police forces requires a network of rule of law
institutions that will oversee police activity and effectively use a system of punishment and
rewards when necessary.89 The challenge for reformers is that some (or all) of these institutions
may not be functional, and therefore any attempt to increase accountability of the police force
becomes dependent on further rule of law reforms, such as the prosecutorial agency and the
courts. This is a challenge that cannot be taken lightly. Rule of law reforms are complex - many
fail and even those that succeed take an extended period time to become fully functional.90 An
example of the complexities involved in such reforms is prosecution and sanctioning of police
abuse in Latin America. In a detailed study of five state and provincial jurisdictions in Argentina,
Brazil and Uruguay, Daniel Brinks shows that judicial responses to police abuse are dependent
on many more variables (such as intrinsic biases in the system and informational and normative
failures) than simply an investigative system to collect the necessary information for prosecution
to take place, an effective and impartial prosecutorial office, and an independent judiciary.91
Thus, to effectively deal with such problems, reformers need to look at the entire system,
including victims’ access to legal aid, instead of looking at one institution in the system, the
police.92 In this context, there are important reforms of these other institutions that may help
89
Trebilcock and Daniels, Rule of Law Reform and Development, 107-144. See also, Daniel M. Brinks, The Judicial
Response to Police Killings in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 247 (on the importance of these
institutions in the case of police killings).
90
Pinheiro, “Governo Democrático, violência e Estado (ou não) de direito”; Pinheiro, “The Paradox of Democracy
in Brazil”; Sabet, “Police Reform in Mexico”; Sandro et al., “Monitorando a Polícia”; Michael Trebilcock and M.
Prado, What Makes Poor Countries Poor? Institutional Determinants of Development; Trebilcock and Daniels, Rule
of Law Reform and Development; Tamanaha, On the Rule of Law: History, Politics, Theory; Carothers, “The Rule of
Law Revival”; Erik Jensen, ed., Beyond Common Knowledge: Empirical Approaches to the Rule of Law (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2003), especially Thomas Heller, Ch. 11 “An Immodest Postscript”; Bryant Garth and
Yves Dezelay, “Introduction” in Global Prescriptions: The Production, Exportation and Importation of a New
Legal Orthodoxy, ed. Bryant Garth and Yves Dezelay (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).
91
Daniel Brinks, The Judicial Response to Police Killings in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
92
Ibid. at 247.
29
improve police behaviour,93 but it is not particularly helpful to suggest that Latin American
countries need to revamp their rule of law institutions across the board in order to achieve
democratic policing. Without dismissing the importance of political stability and functioning
rule of law institutions in securing democratic policing, we ask whether there are specific police
reforms that could bring these countries closer to democratic policing.
Despite avoiding these institutional complexities, reform attempts focused on police
forces have also faced significant obstacles in Latin America due to path dependence. As
indicated in the previous section, there is often resistance by the police force to externally
imposed reforms. In addition, political support for reforms needs to be strong and continuous, as
opposed to being scattered and volatile, as it has been the case in many countries. It is clear,
therefore, that successful reforms are more likely to happen in cases where there is
simultaneously external (i.e. political) and internal (i.e. within the police force) support for
reforms.94 However, these cases are very rare.
External support for police reform depends on so many variables that it is hard to say
whether and how reformers could be able to foster or generate such support in countries where
none exists. For this reason, we will focus on cases where there is strong political support to
promote police reform, but most proposals are likely to face significant resistance within the
police force. Our claim is that in such cases there is one strategy that seems particularly
promising in overcoming internal resistance to reforms: bypassing the existing police force. This
reform strategy does not rely on existing institutions. Instead, reformers create or use parallel
police forces to perform the same function as the dysfunctional police force institutions, and try
93
For some of these, see Brinks, The Judicial Response to Police Killings in Latin America, 247-260.
94
Trebilcock and Daniels, Rule of Law Reform and Development, 339-340.
30
to make them perform such functions in a more effective manner. In another paper, Mariana
Mota Prado has called this strategy an institutional bypass.95
A recent example of an institutional bypass in police reforms is the recent reforms to
create Pacifying Police Units (Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora, UPPs) in Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil. The project began in December 2007 and is focused on taking back territories controlled
by drug dealers and criminal organizations, mostly in low-income neighborhoods with illegal
settlements known as favelas.96 The project is divided in three stages: occupation, pacification,
and the creation of a new police unit (UPP). 97 The occupation and pacification are done by an
elite police force called BOPE (in some cases with the help of the army). While these first two
stages can be described as the removal of the old principal (see section a supra), the third stage,
the creation of the UPP, can be considered an institutional bypass. A new UPP performs exactly
the same functions of the traditional police force, but is staffed by new recruits that go through a
different training, receive higher salaries than the traditional police officers, use different
uniforms, and adopt more preventive strategies to prevent crimes.98 From the beginning, there
was strong political and financial support for the reforms by the federal, state and local
95
Mariana Mota Prado, “Institutional Bypass: An Alternative for Development Reform” (April 19, 2011). Available
at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1815442 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1815442.
96
Ricardo Henrique and Silvia Ramos, “UPPs Sociais: ações sociais para consolidar a pacificação”, in Rio a Hora
da Virada, eds. André Urani and Fabio Giambiagi (Elsevier, Rio de Janeiro, 2011), 243. See also Clarissa Huguet
and Ilona Szabó de Carvalho, “Violence in the Brazilian Favelas and the Role of the Police”, New Directions for
Youth Development 119 (2008 Fall), 93-109 (providing a history of favelas and showing the concentration and
extremely high incidence of police violence against people living in these areas).
97
Stahlberg, “The Pacification of Favelas in Rio de Janeiro”, 8-9. But see Nicole Maria Turcheti e Melo, “Public
Policy for the Favelas in Rio de Janeiro: the Problem (in) Framing”, Master Thesis in Development Studies,
International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands (November 2010) (describing also a fourth
phase, called “post-occupation”).
98
For a detailed description see Stahlberg, “The Pacification of Favelas in Rio de Janeiro”, 13-14. See also Sergio
Guimarães Ferreira, “Segurança Pública nas Grandes Cidades,” in Brasil: a Nova Agenda Social, ed. E. Bacha and
S. Schwartzman (Rio de Janeiro: Editora LTC, 2011), 309 (indicating that reformers refer to UPPs as the “new
police”).
31
governments, which happen to have elected leaders from the same coalition.99 However,
previous attempts to change the traditional police force, including numerous Community-based
Policing programs, had met fierce resistance.100 The UPPs avoided this problem of internal
resistance by keeping the traditional institution (the old police force) in place and creating a
parallel institution that performs exactly the same function but has a different organizational
structure.
Any institutional bypass is mindful of the fact that path dependence is a significant
obstacle to institutional reforms. However, the UPPs are also mindful of such obstacles in two
aspects of their institutional design. First, there is concern with sequencing. For instance, UPPs
are not trying to establish citizens as principals.101 Instead, the State Department of Public
Security in Rio de Janeiro refers to UPP as proximity policing, instead of community policing.102
While community policing is often characterized by institutionalized mechanisms to ensure that
the police will account for and respond to the needs and interests of the community, the
proximity policing adopts strategies to create a respectful dynamic between police officers and
members of the community without creating institutional mechanisms of control by the
community over the police force. The strategies to create proximity in UPPs are mostly training
and a system of financial incentives where police officers receive bonus payments if a certain
99
Ibid., 21. The political support was combined with a higher level of autonomy to the Secretary of Public Security.
This autonomy reduced the political interference in the design of reforms, blocking undue electoral pressures and the
lack of continuity that characterized previous reforms. Ferreira, “Segurança Pública nas Grandes Cidades,” 302.
100
Sérgio Guimarães Ferreira, “Segurança pública no Rio de Janeiro: o caminho das pedras e dos espinhos,” in Rio a
Hora da Virada, eds. André Urani and Fabio Giambiagi (Elsevier, Rio de Janeiro, 2011), 73-99.
101
Ignacio Cano et al., Os Donos do Morro: Uma Avaliação Exploratória do Impacto das Unidades de Polícia
Pacificadora (UPPs) no Rio de Janeiro (Forum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública and Laboratório de Análise da
Violência – UERJ, May 2012), 144-146. See also Abhijit Banerjee, Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, Esther Duflo,
Daniel Keniston, and Nina Singh, “Can Institutions be Reformed from Within? Evidence from a Randomized
Experiment with the Rajasthan Police”, NBER Working Paper Series - National Bureau of Economic Research
17912 (2012) (showing some of the difficulties of establishing police reforms in India that depend on sustained
cooperation of the communities).
102
Stahlberg, “The Pacification of Favelas in Rio de Janeiro”, 9.
32
region has reduced rates of crime and police abuse.103 Second, there is ample room for
experimentation and the program is imbued with flexibility, so that it can adapt to different
circumstances.104
In addition to the UPPs, one could possibly conceive of some efforts to promote
Community Based Policing (CBP) as an example of bypass, as they try to promote
accountability by bypassing dysfunctional governance structures. CBP is the conventional
wisdom on police reform, as advocated by USAID, the World Bank, and much scholarly writing.
Although the concept of CBP admits of a wide range of understandings,105 one of its goals in
North America is to make the police a proactive institution that responds to the needs of their
particular communities. This includes building ties with community members through
neighborhood councils, structural changes to the police hierarchy to make it less centralized and
more responsive to local conditions, and training of officers on how to build positive
relationships with citizens.106 The expectation is that such reforms will build trust with
communities, make the police be able to respond better to the needs of citizens, better protect
their rights, and better respect the rule of law – thereby making them more effective at fighting
and preventing crime. In sum, CBP in North America could be described as an effort to establish
citizens as principals; the very last step in creating democratic policing according to the
sequencing proposed in this paper.
103
Stahlberg, “The Pacification of Favelas in Rio de Janeiro”, 13-14, 27.
104
Ibid., 29.
105
CBP encompasses a diverse collection of policies including decentralized authority, a focus on investigative work
and preventative measures over reactive policies, and involving communities in the policing process. See Fruhling,
Hugo, “A Realistic Look at Latin American community policing programs,” Policing and Society 22, no. 1 (2012):
78; Diane Davis, “Community policing: Variations on the Western model in the developing world,” Police Practice
and Research 4, no. 3 (2003): 285-286.
106
John Mclean et al., “Jamaica – Community Based Policing Assessment,” 26-29; Paulo de Mesquita Neto, “Paths
toward Police and Judicial Reform in Latin America,” in Toward a Society under Law: Citizens and their Police in
Latin America, ed. Joseph S. Tulchin and Meg Ruthenburg (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Press Centre, 2006),
164.
33
In the Latin American context CBP should be conceived differently. It should not be a
reform to establish citizens as principals. Instead, it is more likely to be successful as a reform to
establish the community as an effective oversight mechanism that will make police accountable
to the law. Similarly to UPPs, small-scale CBP pilot projects, focusing on a particular
neighborhood, can be an important tool for countries that suffer from significant failures in
accountability mechanisms at the national, state/provincial or municipal level. Politically or
institutionally broad reforms to make these mechanisms effective are complicated and likely to
be strongly resisted. Establishing such mechanisms at a lower level, instead, can be a useful
approach to reform in the interim as their narrow political scope makes them low-risk projects
that require less political capital and investment than comprehensive reforms. Another benefit is
that CBPs are small pilot projects that minimize the negative impacts of failed attempts. The
Grants Pen project, while a failure in Jamaica, is a good example of minimizing the fallout from
experimentation. Since the efforts to implement CBP in 2002107 were confined to one
neighborhood, the lack of success did not deter the government from undertaking another CBP
experiment in Flakers Bay in 2006 that proved more successful.108 Thus, CBPs are an
opportunity to create accountability mechanisms for a single police station that is not under the
control of drug gangs.
While very promising in theory, CBP projects do not always work well in practice. CBP
has been successfully implemented in developed, democratic countries such as the United
States,109 but attempts to adopt these methods in Latin America have met with mixed results.110
107
Mclean et al., “Jamaica – Community Based Policing Assessment,” 2.
108
Eric Beinhart, “Jamaica Fights Gangs and Violence Island-wide,” USAID FrontLines, 2010, 6.
109
Fruhling, “The Impact of Community Policing and Police Reform,” 46; Fruhling, “A Realistic Look at Latin
American community policing programs,” 78.
110
Fruhling, “The Impact of Community Policing and Police Reform,” 45-46; Davis, “Community policing:
Variations on the Western model in the developing world.”
34
Our hypothesis in the Latin American context is that many CBP projects fail, in part, because of
the broader institutional environment. While CBPs in North America and Europe have self-
reinforcing accountability mechanisms at the higher levels, CBPs in Latin America seek to make
lower level mechanisms of accountability effective without reinforcements at the higher level.
This makes the task significantly more challenging, but it also makes it significantly more
relevant as the CBP is likely to be one of the few, if not the only effective accountability
mechanism in many cases.
Given the lack of mechanisms of accountability at higher levels, one risk that CBPs face
in Latin America is the risk of capture. Indeed, a common CBP reform is to increase engagement
between the police and a particular neighborhood by creating a forum where police and
community can interact.111 These forums can take the form of neighborhood committees,
community panels, or local security fronts.112 However, there are many obstacles to these forums
becoming effective mechanisms of civilian oversight. In general, the communities in which
people have the time to volunteer on committees and boards tend to be those that need CBP the
least.113 In other cases, community panels are dominated by a small group of people that is not
representative of the interests of the entire community. This unrepresentative minority often
pursues pet projects that yield little benefit in terms of social safety. In other words, a small
group starts to control the local police force and use it for its own benefits. Examples abound. In
111
Ungar, “Police Reform in Argentina: Public Security versus Human Rights,” 181; Markus-Michael Muller,
“Community Policing in Latin America: Lessons from Mexico City,” European Review of Latin American and
Caribbean Studies 88 (2010): 26; Llorrente, María Victoria Llorrente, “Demilitarization in a War Zone,” in Public
Security and Police Reform in the Americas, ed. John Bailey and Lucía Dammert (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2006).
112
Llorrente “Demilitarization in a War Zone”; Alberto Fohrig, Julia S. Pomares, and Cecilia Gortari. “Citizen
Security Policy in Argentina: The National Crime Prevention Plan,” in Toward a Society Under Law:Citizens and
Their Police in Latin America, ed. Joseph S. Tulchin and Meg Ruthenburg (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center
Press, 2006), 246-247.
113
Christopher E. Stone and Heather H. Ward, “Democratic policing: A framework for action,” Policing and Society
10, no. 1(2000).
35
Mexico City, the Policia de Barrio, those who sat on the neighbourhood committees “tended to
‘privatize the Policia de Barrio assigned to their neighbourhood and use them for private
purposes.”114 In the Grants Pen neighbourhood of Kingston, Jamaica, for example, a pilot project
sponsored by USAID failed because local stakeholders paid the police to change their routes and
protect business interests.
In these cases, the risk of capture can be reduced by changing the governance structure of
community panels and neighborhood boards to increase the plurality of groups represented in
these panels or commissions. In Costa Rica, for example, a successful CBP program in the
Hatillo neighborhood was overseen by a committee with representatives from “the community at
large, churches, sports leagues and health services.”115 Along the same lines, Fruhling suggests
that a mixed commission model with representatives from governmental and non-governmental
institutions is more likely to generate desirable outcomes than neighborhood commissions.116
As the examples above illustrate, for CBP to effectively operate as a bypass of otherwise
ineffective accountability mechanisms within the state, the active and continuous participation of
the community in CBP projects is key.117 However, even without capture, there may strong
resistance inside the police force to community policing.118 Indeed, one aspect that is common to
different countries is that such reforms, if externally imposed, are less likely to be effective, as
114
Muller, “Community Policing in Latin America: Lessons from Mexico City,” 28.
115
Randall and Ramirez, “Policing the Police: Formal and Informal Police Oversight Mechanisms in the Americas,”
12.
116
Fruhling, “The Impact of Community Policing and Police Reform.”
117
Niels Uildriks, “Mexican Police and Reform: A Theoretical Introduction,” in Mexico’s Unrule of Law, ed. Niels
Uildriks (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010), 26-27; Hugo Fruhling, “The Impact of Community Policing and Police
Reform,” in Toward a Society under Law: Citizens and their Police in Latin America, ed. Joseph S. Tulchin and
Meg Ruthenburg (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Press Centre, 2006).
118
Anthony Harriott, “Police Transformation and International Cooperation – The Jamaican Experience,“ in
Policing Insecurity: Police Reform, Security, and Human Rights in Latin America, ed. Niels A. Uildriks (Lanham:
Lexington Books, 2009); Uildriks, “Mexican Police and Reform: A Theoretical Introduction,” 29.
36
discussed in the previous section. Creating a new police force, as was the case with Brazil’s
UPPs, may be an effective strategy in overcoming this resistance.
The Brazilian case of UPPs also illustrates how governmental reforms can be positively
reinforced with the support of external groups. In addition to financial support for police reform,
a group of business people hired a private consulting firm to map dysfunctional processes and
create a modernization plan for the State department in charge of the police force (Secretaria de
Segurança Pública), which is a civilian body that was clearly incapable of effectively performing
its oversight functions. In addition to business people, a group of scholars contributed ideas and
proposals, enriching the dialogue.119 Thus, with the help of these external groups, what started as
small pilot projects in certain communities is now becoming a broader institutional reform of the
police force at the state level. The fact that multiple groups with divergent interests were
involved in the reform process probably reduced the risk of one group capturing the police and
using it to protect their own interests, as was the case in the Grants Pen project in Jamaica.
Including a wide array of services in addition to public security, such as sanitation and
public revitalization, Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) seem to be an example in which a
similar structure is at work.120 A clear example of BIDs in Latin America is the Projeto Zonas
Seguras in Bogota, Colombia, where the involvement of business people provided financing and
accountability that contributed to the success of these reforms.121 However, BIDs in Guatemala
have excluded (formally and informally) lower classes, making the benefit of enhanced security
exclusive to a certain portion of the population.122 This has been attributed to the fact that such
119
Ferreira, “Segurança Pública nas Grandes Cidades,” 301-302.
120
Lorlene Hoyt and Devika Gopal-Agge, “The Business Improvement Model: A Balanced Review of
Contemporary Debates”, Geography Compass 1, no. 4 (2007); Jerry Mitchell, “Business Improvement Districts and
the ‘New’ Revitalization of Downtown,” Economic Development Quarterly 15, no. 2 (2001).
121
Ferreira, “Segurança Pública nas Grandes Cidades,” 298-299.
122
Kevin Lewis O’Neill and Kedron Thomas, ed., Securing the City: Neoliberalism, Space, and Insecurity in
Postwar Guatemala (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 84-87.
37
projects have relied on private security forces, which is a different type of bypass than the one
discussed here. In the Brazilian experience, the government is the one creating a parallel public
institution, instead of bypassing a public institution with a private one.123 In any event, such
cases may indicate one of the limits of excessive reliance on small, localized pilot projects and
some of distributive concerns associated with them.124
It is important to clarify that the bypass does not need to be limited to the actual police
force and its internal governance structures, as the examples above illustrate. Indeed, reformers
can bypass the institution that provides information about police abuse and misconduct to the
officials that are able to carry on disciplinary measures. For instance, Daniel Brinks analyzes in
detail cases of police abuse in Latin America and concludes: “one of the crucial preconditions for
an effective rule of law is the presence of multiple alternative sources of information concerning
the conduct of lower level actors in the system, including ordinary citizens”.125 In light of the
failure of the state to provide such alternative sources of information, in some countries NGOs
fill this vacuum, either by conducting independent investigations that will provide the system
with more information, or by providing victims with the necessary resources to seek more
effective assertion of their legal rights.126 The important aspect of these bypasses is the fact that
they are seeking to correct imbalances in the system, by providing those who are deprived of
power, influence and resources with means to seek justice. This suggests that bypasses internal
to police forces can perhaps be complemented by external bypasses that enhance the
123
For the distinction between public-public and public-private bypasses, see Prado, “Institutional Bypass”, 34-37.
124
Jill Simone Gross, “Business Improvement Districts in New York City’s Low-Income and High Income
Neighbourhoods,” Economic Development Quarterly 19 (2005). Gross discusses how the size of the BIDs, balance
of power among stakeholders, and wealth of communities impact on the outcomes.
125
Daniel Brinks, The Judicial Response to Police Killings in Latin America: Inequality and the Rule of Law
(Cambridge University Press, 2008), 254.
126
Ibid. at 247.
38
functionality of other rule of law institutions, therefore enhancing the overall accountability of
the police force.
IV. CONCLUSION
The core problem of policing in Latin America is how to successfully transition to
democratic policing, starting by creating a police force that is accountable to the law and
culminating with the establishment of citizens as the principals. The line that marks the end of
one phase of reforms and the beginning of the next is blurred and hard to define. Moreover, there
is no blueprint that can be used as a model for all countries. In this context, the purpose of the
paper is not to provide a formula. Instead, our goal is to define where our core institutional
concerns should lie, acknowledging that the institutional details that will effectively address
these concerns will vary from country to country, and even across different regions within the
same country.
Our main argument is that our core institutional concern with police reform should vary
from case to case. Latin America’s transition to democracy in the 1970s and 80s was the first
step in moving away from authoritarian police regimes, where the police was simply an agent of
autocratic governments. Democratizing these police agencies means creating a police force that
is accountable to the law and it also means removing the old principal (the authoritarian regime),
and establishing a new one, the citizenry. However, in this process many Latin American
countries have ended up with criminal and autarkic police forces (where criminal groups are the
principals or there is no principal) that have varying degrees of accountability to the law.
Transforming these into democratic police forces has proven challenging. As we argue in the
paper, successful and unsuccessful reform projects can be associated with effective and
39
ineffective governance mechanisms, and some successful cases may provide guidelines for
future action.
As the Arab Spring continues to unfold in the Middle East, middle-income countries in
this region have the potential for a similar transition to democracy. Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya –
middle-income countries that have had authoritarian police agencies – have already overthrown
their authoritarian political regimes.127 Ongoing protests in Yemen, Syria, and other Middle
Income countries suggest changes may also occur there.128 The outcome of the Arab Spring
revolutions is highly uncertain, but if a wave of democratization occurs in the region, then the
lessons of our paper and of other countries that have gone through democratic transitions129
should be considered when attempting to reform the authoritarian police agencies in these
countries. Addressing authoritarian legacies and principal-agent problems, taking advantage of
windows of opportunity, and selecting the appropriate political and institutional scope of reforms
will be crucial if the Middle East is to avoid the pitfalls that have thwarted many reform efforts
in Latin America.
127
David D. Kirkpatrick and David E. Sanger, “A Tunisian-Egyptian Link that Shook Arab History,” The New York
Times, February 13, 2011; Foreign Policy, “The Dark Corners of Qaddafi’s Police State,” Foreign Policy,
September 6, 2011, accessed January 12, 2012,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/09/06/the_dark_corners_of_qaddafis_police_state.
128
The World Bank, “Country and Lending Groups,” The World Bank, accessed January 12, 2012,
http://data.worldbank.org/about/country-classifications/country-and-lending-groups#Lower_middle_income.
129
Gerber & Mendelson, “Public Experience of Police Violence and Corruption in Contemporary Russia.”
40
Appendix –
[Insert Table Here]
Related papers
'I am watching you. Are you watching yourself in me? 1 ': Reflection as an act of 'triangulation'
Psychodynamic Practice, 2023
Judges and Ruth: An Introduction and Commentary
Bulletin for Biblical Research, 2019
Speculative Fabulations: Enter the Archive, or ‘Beneath Yaba’s Garden’
Feminist Review, 2020
Los nombres de persona de los troyanos y de los griegos en la Iliada
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), 2005
Experimental and numerical results on VIV and WIO
Springer eBooks, 2008
Leaf Damage Based Phenotyping Technique and Its Validation Against Fall Armyworm, Spodoptera frugiperda (J. E. Smith), in Maize
Frontiers in Plant Science, 2022
4-Dimensional Transportation Problem for Substitute and Complementary Items Under Rough Environment
Recent Advances in Intelligent Information Systems and Applied Mathematics, 2020
ARTICULACIÓN ESTATAL Y COMUNITARIA. RESCATE, RESTITUCIÓN Y RE-ENTIERRO DE RESTOS HUMANOS Y OBJETOS ARQUEOLÓGICOS EN LA PROVINCIA DE TUCUMÁN
Trabajo presentado en el Simposio Arqueología y antropología indígena en América del Sur en el XXI Congreso Nacional de Arqueología Argentina realizado en la ciudad de Corrientes entre el 10 al 14 de julio de 2023., 2023
The Fatherland’s Front İn Bursa
International journal of social inquiry, 2017
- Find new research papers in:
- Physics
- Chemistry
- Biology
- Health Sciences
- Ecology
- Earth Sciences
- Cognitive Science
- Mathematics
- Computer Science