[PDF] Making Police Reform Matter In Latin America eBook

Author : Mary Fran T. Malone
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 36,68 MB
Release : 2023-08-15
Category :
ISBN : 9781685853532

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"An essential update on the increasingly vital efforts at police reform throughout Latin America. It provides a much-needed analytical and empirical foundation for grasping the full range of emerging challenges that the region faces in providing citizen security amid mounting political and socioeconomic instability." --Mark Ungar, Brooklyn College, CUNY 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. CONTENTS: The Challenges of Police Reform in Latin America. Policing and Public Security in Latin America. Chile: Too Good to Be True? Colombia: Success Amid Conflict and Stability. Costa Rica: Exceptionalism Under Strain. Nicaragua: A Return to Political Policing. Panama: Rebuilding Security After Invasion. Peru: The Challenges of Institutional Instability. Uruguay: Success in a Social Welfare State. What We Have Learned and Why It Matters.

Author : Niels Uildriks
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 20,31 MB
Release : 2009-04-16
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 073913230X

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Profound distrust commonly characterizes not only the relationship between citizens and state institutions, but also social, as well as inter- and intra-state relations. This impacts the effectiveness and quality of the service provided by state institutions. The degree to which police and judicial reforms are able to generate trust on these fronts is therefore an important yardstick to judge their relevance under varying circumstances of 'post-authoritarian rule', but this question is largely ignored inthe current literature on policing and reform. From this perspective, Policing Insecurity: Police Reform, Security, and Human Rights in Latin America suggests an agenda of future reforms for the region, drawing and building upon policing reform experiences throughout the Latin America, looking at issues such as impunity, professionalization, community policing, as well as accountability and training of the police. By explicitly linking issues of state-social trust, democratic transition, human rights, and security, these case studies provide a basis for the wider discussion in the book about prerequisites for the success or failure of police reforms, thus adding to our empirical and theoretical knowledge in these areas and introducing an importantdimension to the literature on police reform, security, and human rights.

Author : Stephen Johnson
Publisher : CSIS Reports
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 15,7 MB
Release : 2012-03
Category : Police
ISBN : 9780892067046

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Police reform is a growth industry in the Americas. First, security threats have largely shifted from external state-sponsored aggression to stateless crime that affects citizens more directly and undermines confidence in government. Once deployed for external defense as well as for guarding internal order, armies are not equipped to deal with public safety in a setting where combating crime requires special knowledge to protect the rights of victims and perpetrators, preserve evidence, and apply the right intelligence and patrolling tools to keep crimes from happening. Second, not all Latin American law enforcement institutions can protect citizens in this manner, given that in some cases they are tied to political parties or that they exist as a poorer, fourth branch of the army. As Latin American countries have consolidated democratic practices in a post-Cold War setting, the need for effective policing, specialized law enforcement agencies, and legal frameworks to help them coordinate actions will become only more urgent. At the same time, the need for capable defense will continue, perhaps with smaller or more specialized militaries. And, because these forces always have personnel in training, they will continue to be called on periodically to support civilian authority, as most police, even in the United States, have limited surge capacity. To the extent that the security and stability of close hemispheric neighbors impinge on the security and well-being of U.S. citizens, the United States will be obliged to promote regional law enforcement reforms. If not, other countries such as China and Iran may be willing to do that, perhaps in ways the United States might not like, potentially putting American interests and lives at risk. Police reform is a hugely complicated undertaking, in which there are no easily transferable formulas for success. The authors discuss a strategic approach in which planning considers trends, the threat environment, available resources, institutional strengths and weaknesses, and leadership and applies common evaluation standards that will permit U.S. assistance to be successful and less wasteful.

Author : John Bailey
Publisher :
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 19,97 MB
Release : 2006
Category : Democratization
ISBN : 9781306963336

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The events of September 11, 2001, combined with a pattern of increased crime and violence in the 1980s and mid-1990s in the Americas, has crystallized the need to reform government policies and police procedures to combat these threats. Public Security and Police Reform in the Americas examines the problems of security and how they are addressed in Latin America and the United States. Bailey and Dammert detail the wide variation in police tactics and efforts by individual nations to assess their effectiveness and ethical accountability. Policies on this issue can take the form of authoritarianism, which threatens the democratic process itself, or can, instead, work to demilitarize the police force. Bailey and Dammert argue that although attempts to apply generic models such as the successful zero tolerance created in the United States to the emerging democracies of Latin America where institutional and economic instabilities exist may be inappropriate, it is both possible and profitable to consider these issues from a common framework across national boundaries. Public Security and Police Reform in the Americas lays the foundation for a greater understanding of policies between nations by examining their successes and failures and opens a dialogue about the common goal of public security."

Author : Mark Ungar
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 387 pages
File Size : 38,36 MB
Release : 2020-03-03
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1421429403

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2011 Winner of the Charles H. Levine Memorial Book Prize of the International Political Science Association Latin America’s crime rates are astonishing by any standard—the region’s homicide rate is the world’s highest. This crisis continually traps governments between the need for comprehensive reform and the public demand for immediate action, usually meaning iron-fisted police tactics harking back to the repressive pre-1980s dictatorships. In Policing Democracy, Mark Ungar situates Latin America at a crossroads between its longstanding form of reactive policing and a problem-oriented approach based on prevention and citizen participation. Drawing on extensive case studies from Argentina, Bolivia, and Honduras, he reviews the full spectrum of areas needing reform: criminal law, policing, investigation, trial practices, and incarceration. Finally, Policing Democracy probes democratic politics, power relations, and regional disparities of security and reform to establish a framework for understanding the crisis and moving beyond it.

Author : Daniel Sabet
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 298 pages
File Size : 21,40 MB
Release : 2012-05-02
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0804782067

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The urgent need to professionalize Mexican police has been recognized since the early 1990s, but despite even the most well-intentioned promises from elected officials and police chiefs, few gains have been made in improving police integrity. Why have reform efforts in Mexico been largely unsuccessful? This book seeks to answer the question by focusing on Mexico's municipal police, which make up the largest percentage of the country's police forces. Indeed, organized crime presents a major obstacle to institutional change, with criminal groups killing hundreds of local police in recent years. Nonetheless, Daniel Sabet argues that the problems of Mexican policing are really problems of governance. He finds that reform has suffered from a number of policy design and implementation challenges. More importantly, the informal rules of Mexican politics have prevented the continuity of reform efforts across administrations, allowed patronage appointments to persist, and undermined anti-corruption efforts. Although many advances have been made in Mexican policing, weak horizontal and vertical accountability mechanisms have failed to create sufficient incentives for institutional change. Citizens may represent the best hope for counterbalancing the toxic effects of organized crime and poor governance, but the ambivalent relationship between citizens and their police must be overcome to break the vicious cycle of corruption and ineffectiveness.

Author : Diego Esparza
Publisher :
Page : pages
File Size : 42,95 MB
Release : 2022
Category : Latin America
ISBN : 9781955055628

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"Challenging fundamental assumptions about the virtues of local control, considers why some Latin American countries' police forces are more corrupt than others-and what policy initiatives can turn an abusive police force into one that works for its citizens"--

Author : Yanilda María González
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 375 pages
File Size : 13,2 MB
Release : 2020-11-12
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1108900380

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In countries around the world, from the United States to the Philippines to Chile, police forces are at the center of social unrest and debates about democracy and rule of law. This book examines the persistence of authoritarian policing in Latin America to explain why police violence and malfeasance remain pervasive decades after democratization. It also examines the conditions under which reform can occur. Drawing on rich comparative analysis and evidence from Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia, the book opens up the 'black box' of police bureaucracies to show how police forces exert power and cultivate relationships with politicians, as well as how social inequality impedes change. González shows that authoritarian policing persists not in spite of democracy but in part because of democratic processes and public demand. When societal preferences over the distribution of security and coercion are fragmented along existing social cleavages, politicians possess few incentives to enact reform.