Mark Ungar

Reassessing community-oriented policing in Latin America

In every part of Latin America, unprecedented levels of violence have even led to questions about the underlying quality of democratic rule. In response to this crisis, governments have enacted an array of policies, ranging from repressive mano dura crackdowns and adoption of new technology to the reform of criminal justice systems. But one of the most popular approaches to reform efforts has been community-oriented policing (COP), a strategy popularised in the USA in the 1990s, which is based on close collaboration between the police and the neighbourhood residents. COP focuses on the causes of crime rather than simply responsding to it by empowering citizens, building police community partnerships, improving social services and using better crime statistics. Street patrols, policy councils and youth services are some of the many COP programmes being adopted in Latin America and other regions. As other authors emphasise, this reform also entails restructuring of police forces to make them more flexible and responsive. Skogan and Hartnett (1997), for example, stress decentralisation of authority and foot patrols to facilitate citizen-police communications and public participation in setting police priorities and developing tactics. The results of these efforts, however, have been very uneven. Some programmes have shown considerable success while others have faced many difficulties and either been defunded or left to expire of their own accord. Why do some projects succeed where others fail? More importantly, what can Latin American policy-makers learn from past experiences in the region in order to develop more effective and successful policies for the future? This edition of Policing and Society takes a step towards answering these questions by bringing together security officials, practitioners and scholars to offer detailed analyses of community reform efforts at the local, regional and national levels throughout Latin America. The articles cover programmes in Colombia, Chile, Venezuela, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Argentina, Mexico and Brazil. By detailing the challenges facing reform and how to overcome them, these cases provide an important compendium about community policing in Latin America that will help practitioners and policy-makers build effective durable programmes. This introduction highlights critical issues that the individual articles develop further. Those challenges, as contributors discuss, fall along two main dimensions: support

Policing Youth in Latin America

Among the host of ills afflicting Latin America today—from poverty to political instability—youth has become the primary focus of both blame and concern. One of the most serious of the many problems that disproportionately affect young people is violent crime—marked by a 41 percent rise in homicides that has made Latin America the world’s deadliest region (PAHO 2002). Scholars and policymakers have brought out the causes of the rising crime rates, from poverty to authoritarian legacies. But they have neglected the centrality of youth—as both a group and as a concept—in understanding why crime has turned into a citizen security crisis in Latin America. The policing of youth, this chapter asserts, shows that the region’s response to crime is stuck between its long-standing, centralized, repressive, and often iron fist (mano dura) response on the one hand and, on the other, preventative policing based on addressing crime’s causes through citizen participation and institutional accountability. This impasse leads to contradictory and overly ambitious policies that allow police structures and practices to continue to be based on identifying, separating out, and cracking down on social sectors and areas regarded as inherently criminal—above all, on youth and in the spaces they congregate.

Community policing in Honduras: local impacts of a national programme

Among the regions of Latin America, the northern triangle of Central America – comprising the countries of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras – is at once the most promising and inhospitable places for community policing. The complete overhauls of these three countries’ security system with the peace accords in the 1990s opened up an unprecedented opportunity to re-structure and re-think the idea of citizen security. Each country had a revamped and civilianised police force supported by international training and a set of accountability agencies. Guatemala, for example, formed a National Human Rights Office, a police Human Rights Office, a Professional Responsibility Office to investigate charges of abuse, and a Disciplinary Regime Section. These countries also underwent thorough judicial reforms, such as by expanding courts and preventive measures geared toward youth at risk. Combined with strong local identities, particularly among indigenous communities in Guatemala, such conditions appeared to give community policing a strong basis for success.

Democracy, Law, and Order

The Judicial Response to Police Killings in Latin America: Inequality and the Rule of Law. By Daniel M. Brinks. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. 289 + xi.

Introduction: The Evolution of Environmental Enforcement

85.00 cloth. Reforming the Administration of Justice in Mexico. Edited by Wayne A. Cornelius and David A. Shirk. San Diego: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego; Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Pp. 523 + xi.

A critical assessment of INPA’s scientific cooperation based on publications from 2004 to 2014

37.50 paper. Judges beyond Politics in Democracy and Dictatorship: Lessons from Chile. By Lisa Hilbink. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. 299 + xvi.

A Rede de Criminalidade: O Estado e as Políticas de Seguranga na América

80.00 cloth. Enforcing the Rule of Law: Social Accountability in the New Latin American Democracies. Edited by Enrique Peruzzotti and Catalina Smulovitz. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. Pp. 362 + xiv.

La Red de Criminalidad: El Estado y las Políticas de Seguridad en América

29.95 paper. The Politics of Organized Crime and the Organized Crime of Politics: A Study in Criminal Power. By Alfredo Schulte-Bockholt. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006. Pp. 263 + ix.

Elusive Reform: Democracy and the Rule of Law in Latin America

82.00 cloth.

The Privatization of Citizen Security in Latin America: From Elite Guards to Neighborhood Vigilantes

26.95 paper. The Judicialization of Politics in Latin America. Edited by Rachel Sieder, Line Schjolden, and Alan Angell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. 320.