Policing insurgency: are more militarized police more effective?

ABSTRACT

Is militarized policing an effective way to combat insurgency? This article uses new global data on policing practices to evaluate whether states with militarized police perform better than those without them. The analysis provides no evidence that militarized police are an asset in counterinsurgency. Indeed, states with militarized units within their national or federal-level police are generally less likely to achieve favorable counterinsurgency outcomes. In explaining these findings, the article emphasizes that while militarization provides police with greater coercive capacity, it also impedes information collection and contributes to indiscriminate violence that can fuel additional dissent.

KEYWORDS:

• Policing
• militarized policing
• counterinsurgency
• civil war outcomes

Acknowledgments

This research has been supported by a grant from the Centennial Fund, a fund of the American Political Science Association’s Centennial Center, and by the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center at Hamilton College. I am grateful to Nicole Eisenberg, Max Gersch, Zac Karabatak, Alexander Nemeth, Diana Perez, Jenny Tran, Huzefah Umer, and Greg Varney for assistance collecting the data on police militarization. I also thank Renanah Miles Joyce, Michael Kenwick, Stuart Schrader, Paul Staniland, Lucia Tiscornia, Michael Weintraub, Peter B. White, and Jessica Zarkin for helpful feedback on the broader project of which this is a part.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See, for instance, Clutterbuck, The Long, Long War; Bayley and Perito, The Police in War, Fair and Ganguly, eds., Policing Insurgencies; Hills, ‘Insurgency, Counterinsurgency and Policing”; Ladwig, “Training Foreign Police”; Mungie, “Indigenous Police Forces in Counterinsurgency”; and Havron et al., “Constabulary Capabilities for Low-Level Conflict.”

2. U.S. Department of the Army, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, para. 6–91.

3. See Epstein, “The Role of the Police in Counterinsurgency,” 149.

4. De Bruin, “Police Militarization and its Political Consequences”; De Bruin, “International Trends in Militarized Policing”; Kraska, “Militarization and Policing”; Rantatalo, “The Miscellany of Militaristic Policing”; Lutterbeck, “Between Police and Military”; and Bayley, “The Police and Political Development in Europe.”

5. Crabtree, for instance, finds that around 50% of political science scholarship on policing focuses on the United States. See Crabtree, “Introduction.”

6. Lawson, “Police Militarization and the Use of Lethal Force”; Delehanty et al., “Militarization and Police Violence”; Mummolo, “Militarization Fails to Enhance Police Safety or Reduce Crime”; and Gamal, “The Racial Politics of Protection.”

7. E.g. Schrader, Badges Without Borders; Go, “The Imperial Origins of American Policing”; and Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop.

8. For a review of existing scholarship, see Eck, Conrad, and Crabtree, “Policing and Political Violence.” Recent exceptions include Bayley and Perito, The Police in War; Fair and Ganguly, eds., Policing Insurgencies; and McCormick, “To Protect, Serve, and Keep the Peace?”

9. Nanes, “Police Integration and Support for Anti-Government Violence in Divided Societies.” Conversely, ethnic exclusion from military and police institutions increases the risk of rebellion; see Roessler, Ethnic Politics and State Power in Africa.

10. De Bruin, How to Prevent Coups, 115–130.

11. Tiscornia, “Police Reform and its Consequences.” On the challenges of police reform in democratizing states, see: Marat, The Politics of Police Reform; González, Authoritarian Police in Democracy.

12. Arriola et al., “Policing Institutions and Post-Conflict Peace”; see also, Mueller, “Policing the Remnants of War”; and Ansorg, Haas, and Strasheim, “Police Reforms in Peace Agreements.”

13. Call and Barnett, “Looking for a Few Good Cops”; Stanley, “Building New Police Forces in El Salvador and Guatemala.”

14. Eck, “The Origins of Policing Institutions”; and Deglow, “Localized Legacies of Civil War.”

15. Fair and Ganguly, Policing Insurgencies.

16. Blair and Weintraub, Mano Dura; Magaloni and Rodriguez, “Institutionalized Police Brutality”; Flores-Macías and Zarkin, “The Militarization of Law Enforcement”; and Flores-Macías, “The Consequences of Militarizing Anti-Drug Efforts.”

17. E.g. Greitens, Dictators and their Secret Police; Revkin, “Police Decentralization, Fragmentation, and Implications for Patterns of Violence.”

18. Hazelton, Bullets Not Ballots; Hazelton, “The 'Hearts and Minds' Fallacy”; Berman and Matanock, “The Empiricists Insurgency”; and Berman, Felter, and Shapiro, Small Wars, Big Data.

19. E.g. Klare and Arnson, Supplying Repression; Huggins, Political Policing; Bruce, “Human Rights and the Training of Third World Police”; Kuzmaraov, Modernizing Repression; Rosenau, U.S. Internal Security Assistance to South Vietnam; Cottam and Marenin, “Predicting the Past”; and Marenin, “The United States’ Aid to African Police Forces.”

20. Kenzer, “Do U.S. Policing Programs Help Boost the Militarization of Foreign Police?”; also see U.S. GAO, “Foreign Police Assistance”; Bayley and Perito, The Police in War; Ladwig, “Training Foreign Police”; and Hills, “Trojan Horses?”

21. E.g. Perito, “Establishing the Rule of Law in Iraq”; Bayley and Perito, The Police in War; Wehrey and Ahram, “The National Guard in Iraq.”

22. Kraska, “Militarization and Policing,” 3.

23. See Kraska, “Militarization and Policing”; Rantatalo, “The Miscellany of Militaristic Policing”; and Simckes et al., “A Conceptualization of Militarization in Domestic Policing.”

24. For a critical perspective on the distinction between military and police forces, see Seigel, “Always Already Military.” Even purportedly civilian police agencies often approach race-class subjugated communities with a militaristic mindset that views them as enemies. See Soss and Weaver, “Police Are Our Government”; and Gamal, “The Racial Politics of Protection.”

25. Flores-Macías and Zarkin, “The Militarization of Law Enforcement.”

26. De Bruin, “Police Militarization and its Political Consequences”; see also Lutterbeck, “Between Police and Military”; and Bayley, “The Police and Political Development in Europe.”

27. Ladwig, “When Police are the Problem.” There a number of reasons why the police might be preferred for this task. Sending the police reduces the regime’s reliance on the military, and thus the risk of bringing it into domestic politics; police might also be deployed when military itself signals that it does not want to participate in domestic security operations.

28. Turkewitz and Villamil, “Colombia’s Police Force, Built for War, Finds a New One.”

29. Quoted in Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence, 128–129.

30. Berman and Matanock, “The Empiricist’s Insurgency”; Berman, Felter, and Shapiro, Small Wars, Big Data; Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War; Lyall and Wilson, “Rage Against the Machines”; and Lyall, “Are Coethnics More Effective Counterinsurgents?”

31. Berman and Matanock, “The Empiricist’s Insurgency,” 446.

32. Clutterbuck, The Long, Long War, 4.

33. Ladwig, “U.S. Security Assistance,” 287.

34. Eck, Conrad, and Crabtree, “Policing and Political Violence,” 8.

35. See Eck, “The Origins of Policing Institutions,” 152; Thompson, Defeating Insurgency, 85. Note, however, that there are some dissenting accounts (e.g. Hazelton, Bullets Not Ballots, 30–48).

36. Bayley and Perito, The Police in War, 51–56.

37. In ‘Policing and the Legacies of Wartime State Predation,’ for instance, Blair and Morse draw upon survey and field experiments in Liberia show that exposure to wartime rebel violence is associated with stronger demand for policing.

38. Kalyvas, Violence in Civil Wars; Condra and Shapiro, “Who Takes the Blame?”

39. E.g. Mungie, “Indigenous Police Forces in Counterinsurgency”; and Havron et al., “Constabulary Capabilities for Low-Level Conflict.”

40. Bayley and Perito, The Police in War; Wehrey and Ahram, “The National Guard in Iraq.”

41. Hills, “Insurgency, Counterinsurgency and Policing.”

42. Moss, “How Iraqi Police Reform Became a Casualty of War.”

43. Lyall and Wilson, “Rage Against the Machines,” 68.

44. E.g. Smith and Toronto, “It’s All the Rage.” Subsequent research has found that the use of mechanized ground forces in combination with airpower results in shorter conflicts – though not necessarily ones with better outcomes for the incumbent government. See Caverley and Sechser, “Military Technology and the Duration of Civil War.”

45. Huggins, Political Policing, 15–16. See also Epstein, “The Role of the Police in Counterinsurgency,” 151; Marat, The Politics of Police Reform, 48–49. In her study of police reform in Central Asia, Marat emphasizes that militarized police ‘have poorer knowledge of the society and understanding of what leads people to protest’ than civilian ones.

46. Mashal, “They Fight Suicide Bombers,” 10; and Smith, “The Future of Afghan Policing.”

47. Officers participating in police reform efforts remarked, ‘people ask themselves why the neighborhood officer no longer exists. The cause is the decomposition of society and the neglect of the state.’ Quoted in González, Authoritarian Police in Democracy, 175.

48. Scoggins, Policing China, 11; also see Bradford et al., “What Price is Fairness When Security Is at Stake?”

49. Flores-Macías and Zarkin, “The Militarization of Law Enforcement”; Blair and Weintraub, Mano Dura; Pion-Berlin and Carreras, “Armed Forces, Police, and Crime Fighting.” In the U.S. context, also see: Delehanty et al., “Militarization and Police Violence”; Lawson, “Police Militarization and the Use of Lethal Force”; and Mummolo, “Militarization Fails to Enhance Police Safety or Reduce Crime.”

50. Bayley and Perito, The Police in War, 76.

51. Cottam and Marenin, “Predicting the Past,” 604. Interestingly, examining policing practices in Colombia, Blair and Weintraub find that while policing by the military is not associated with high rates of violence against civilians, where police assist military patrols, more abuses occur. The authors conclude, ‘if the military and the police co-produce security, then military involvement in law enforcement may exacerbate abuses even if the military itself is not responsible for committing them’ – the police are. Blair and Weintraub, Mano Dura, 43.

52. Taw, “Problems and Potential,” 146.

53. See note 42 above.

54. Condra and Shapiro, “Who Takes the Blame?”

55. Verjee and Kwaja, “Nigeria’s Security Failures.”

56. Fair and Ganguly, Policing Insurgencies, 5–6; Ladwig, “When Police Are the Problem,” 31–33.

57. Curtice and Behlendorf, “Street-level Repression,” 168–169.

58. Hazelton, Bullets Not Ballots; Hazelton, “The 'Hearts and Minds' Fallacy.” Other scholars have noted the tension between creating a strong state and building legitimacy among civilians; e.g. Staniland, “Counterinsurgency is a Bloody, Costly Process.”

59. De Bruin, “Police Militarization and Its Political Consequences.”

60. Taw, “Problems and Potential,” 145.

61. Cottam and Marenin, “Predicting the Past,” 614.

62. Lyall and Wilson, “Rage Against the Machines,” 70.

63. Ibid.

64. In contrast to the United States, where policing is highly decentralized, most states in the dataset have more centralized policing systems, in which the federal or national police conduct the majority of police work. See Lowatcharin, “Centralized and Decentralized Police Systems.”

65. For states in the Middle East and North Africa, the data was collected jointly with Zac Karabatak. For more information on the sources and coding procedures, please see De Bruin and Karabatak, “Militarized Policing in the Middle East and North Africa.”

66. A limitation of this data is that it does not capture how states use their police forces. In some cases, militarized units may not be deployed to combat insurgencies. However, where militarized forces exist, it is rare for them to have no presence in areas experiencing insurgent violence. See Bayley and Perito, The Police in War.

67. In robustness checks, I also examine changes in policing practices during the conflict.

68. Lyall and Wilson, “Rage Against the Machines,” 71. See also Lyall and Wilson’s online appendix for a detailed discussion of the coding and list of insurgencies and outcomes.

69. Ibid.

70. This variable comes from Friedman, “Manpower and Counterinsurgency.” On the role of force size, see also Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency; Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare; and Joes, Resisting Rebellion.

71. E.g. Fearon and Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War”; and Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare.

72. These variables are calculated by Lyall and Wilson, “Rage Against the Machines.”

73. E.g. Kalyvas and Balcells, “International System and Technologies of Rebellion.”

74. The results of all robustness checks can be found in the online appendix.

75. Lyall and Wilson, “Rage Against the Machines,” Table 2, Model 4, p. 88. In doing so, I follow the approach taken in Friedman, “Manpower and Counterinsurgency.” This model includes variables capturing the incumbent regime type, insurgent support, power, energy, occupier status, elevation, distance, and Cold War.

76. The correlation coefficient for militarized policing is −0.12, for paramilitary policing it is 0.09, and for the index of militarization it is 0.03.

77. De Bruin, “Police Militarization and its Political Consequences.”

78. Marat, The Politics of Police Reform; González, Authoritarian Police in Democracies.

79. De Bruin, How to Prevent Coups.

80. Flores-Macías and Zarkin, “The Militarization of Law Enforcement””; and De Bruin and Karabatak, “Militarized Policing in the Middle East and North Africa.”

81. Bayley, “The Police and Political Development in Europe,” 377. In the United States, Hornbostel argues, efforts to undertake putatively non-militarized, liberal reforms of policing, through an emphasis on ‘police-community and police-academic partnerships not only complemented and legitimized conservative demands for “militarized” riot control, but also proved instrumental in … [the] mobilization of a police-industrial complex.’ See Hornbostel, “Public Order is the First Business of Government,” 5–6.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the American Political Science Association; Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center.

Notes on contributors

Erica De Bruin

Erica De Bruin is an Associate Professor of Government at Hamilton College, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Modern War Institute at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Her research focuses on civil-military relations, policing, and civil war. She is the author of How to Prevent Coups d’état: Counterbalancing and Regime Survival (Cornell University Press, 2020). Her research has been published in published in the Journal of Peace Research and Journal of Conflict Resolution. She received her PhD from Yale University. At Hamilton College, she serves as Director of the Justice and Security Program at the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center.