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ABSTRACT
Twenty years into the spread of community-oriented policing (COP) in Latin America, initial assumptions that it would lead to successful transformation of policing in the region are being confounded by continuing insecurity and police violence. Given the disconnect between COP objectives and its implementations, there is a need to reassess the assumption that COP is necessarily a democratic form of policing. This article examines the development of COP in the Dominican Republic with a focus on citizenship policies. It underlines that COP projects have vastly different impacts on individual rights. The inherent community membership boundaries citizenship policies set can condition which groups are to benefit from COP initiatives and which ones are deemed vectors of insecurity. This study is primarily based on a qualitative study including interviews, document analysis, and observation. It finds that Dominican Republic Police (DNP) reforms have improved service provision directed at select groups, which enjoy the benefits of more democratic policing. However, these reforms have also led to an increase in police persecution of Haitian minorities. I demonstrate this population is a target for harder policing because of new citizenship legislation that categorised Haitian descent minorities as outsiders to the community. This adds a distinctively undemocratic flavour to efforts to transform public safety provision in the country.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The purposive sampling was a mix of criterion and convenience based. Most institutional as well as two civil society actors were selected based on criterion sampling of their participation to the July 2015 national police reform forum and/or Congress commission on the reform of the National Police Law in the Winter of 2016. Other actors interviewed, in particular lower ranking members of the DNP, were selected based on a convenience sampling of accessibility and willingness to be interviewed. See Etikan et al. (Citation2016) for more on the potential and limits of purposive and convenience samples.
2 The consulted documents notably included police reform and policy proposals of the think tank Fundación Institucionalidad y Justicia [Institutionality and Justice Foundation] and NGO Participación Ciudadana [Citizen Participation]; reports and access to unpublished records of the NGOs Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos – Republica Dominicana [National Commission of Human Rights - Dominican Republic] and Movimiento de Mujeres Dominico Haitiana [Haitian Dominican women’s movement]; and documents prepared for the Integral Plan for Citizen Security (IPCS) by the academic research center Fundación Global Democracia y Desarrollo [Democracy and Development Global Foundation] and the Center for gender studies of the Insituto Technológico de Santo Domingo [Santo Domingo Technology Institute – Intec].
3 This included training material annotated by successive promotions of police trainees; political flyers collected in the context of the May 2016 Presidential elections; and anti-Haitian flyers distributed on February 27 by right-wing groups on Dominican Independence Day.
4 Observations did not involve police ride-alongs. They were nonparticipant as they did not include active participation, the observer being separated from the activity observed. They were both descriptive (overview of setting) and focused on police activity, as they aimed to provide a nuance appreciation of data collected in personal interviews and document analysis. See Liu & Maitlis (Citation2010) for more details on nonparticipant observation.
5 This notably helped clarify contradicting narratives concerning the treatment of Haitian minorities by police forces in the Dominican Republic. Both interviews and official documents indeed underlined the great polarisation of perspectives on these questions, with police and government actors denying Haitian minorities are differently policed on one side, and civil society representatives denouncing systemic police discrimination on the other one.
6 Potential limits of this method and how I attenuated them include observer effect influencing participant’s interactions, which can be reduced by longer observation periods, as well as observing busy locations where the presence of one individual is less noticeable; selectivity, which can be reduced by conducting observation in different circumstances; and objectivity, which can be reduced by rigorous selection sampling and fieldnotes (Liu and Maitlis Citation2010).
7 Historians refer to two democratic transition in the Dominican Republic: first in 1978, second in 1996. After dictator Rafael Trujillo was assassinated in 1961, his puppet president Joaquín Balaguer maintained his authoritarian rule until 1978, charging the police with the role of fighting internal left-wing menaces. The police maintained its official (and inceptive) militaristic structure and political repression function until the end of Balaguer second era, which lasted from 1988 to 1996 (Bobea Citation2010, Morgan and Espinal Citation2006, Field interview BS, historian).
8 The comprehensive strategy that englobes the IPCS is named the Estrategia Nacional de Desarrollo 2010–2030 (END2030), or National Strategy for Development (MEPD : Citation2014). It is a politic from the MEPD to transform integrally Dominican society. The END2030 grants paramount importance to the concept of citizen security, understood as a society in which all instances of violence must be fought, all the way to their sources. Steps toward this ambitious goal, which includes the modernization of the DNP, are notably developped in the IPCS. For more on the rationale behind the END2030 see MEPD (Citation2010).
9 Famous pictures from the 1996 election displayed in the permanent collection of the Resistance Museum in Santo Domingo show pro-government demonstrations where the police forced civilians to waive Balaguer’s banner at gunpoint, hinting at the hold of the former authoritarian leader on the DNP.
10 Crime rates skyrocketed starting in 2008, in part because of the economic downturn (Bobea Citation2011a). At the time when the IPCS is prepared, insecurity is therefore at the forefront of Dominicans preoccupations. In 2011, 82% of citizens felt delinquency was rising, 39% were constantly scared to be the victims of a crime, and only 9% considered feeling safe (Latinobarómetro Corporation Citation2013). This insecurity explains the framing of the IPCS in terms of citizen security.
11 The 168–13 decision of the Constitutional Court concerned specifically activist Juliana Deguis Pierre, born in the Dominican Republic of Haitian parents in 1984, and registered at birth on the Dominican civil registry. It was decided she would be denied citizenship paper, and refused retroactively the Dominican citizenship because of the irregular status of her parents.
12 Technically, anybody born of parents immigrated without proper documentation after the Constitutional Reform of 1929 - which establish for the first time the term ‘in transit’ - officially faces risks of deportation (Gédéon Citation2014).
13 Often referred to as PNRE, from its original title in Spanish, Plan Nacional de Regularización de los Extranjeros.
14 One of the objective of the NPRF was to quantify the foreign presence on Dominican soil. As of 2018, an estimated 250 000 individuals remain undocumented on Dominican soil (CNDH, Citation2015, Alami, Citation2018). Out of this number, the United Nations Refugee Agency and the Cadre de Liaison Inter-ONG – Haïti [Inter-NGO Liaison Framework – Haïti] (CLIO Citation2016) consider there were at least 133 770 individuals deprived of their rightful Dominican nationality and made stateless as a consequence of bill 169-14.
15 According to the results reported by the General Direction of Migration of the Dominican Republic (GDM), there were 15 754 deportations to Haiti between August 2015 and January 2016, and 113 320 voluntary exits between June 2015 and January 2016.
16 These numbers are based on the most recent annual report published by the GDM (Citation2019). Importantly, the amount of repatriation increased every year during this period, reaching 57,190 expulsions in 2018. 75,243 individuals were also denied entrance, for a record of 132,433 repatriations for the year.
17 This is one of two non-recorded interviews, at the request of the interviewee.
18 Of course, organisations (mostly funded by international aid programmes) such as MUDHA and CNDH do advocate for Haitian descents minorities in the Dominican Republic. However, their ability to influence the public debate is limited by the conservative and nationalistic nature of Dominican Media, with the notable exception of progressive online media Acento.com.do
19 Balaguer played a central role in the development of a pervasive anti-Haitian intellectual construction. He is the author of different xenophobic books arguing for the complete separation of the European Dominican culture and the black imperialistic Haitian culture. He continued to republish openly xenophobic books during his second mandate, which is indicative of the unapologetic persistence of blatant anti-Haitianism among the executive powers of the Dominican Republic until late in the 20th century (Zaglul Citation1990, Fournier-Simard Citation2016).
20 Here, it is important to underline that, while Haitian minorities were evidently the most negatively impacted population by the PSD and the IPCS, others groups have also been subject of increased persecution. For instance, members of the LGBT community have not received attention as potential vulnerable minorities. More generally, marginalised populations in impoverished neighbourhood are also denied such as a status.
21 According to certain interviewees, women of Haitian descent cannot benefit from women protection initiatives, as they not able to benefit from the protection of the law (Field interview BX, women’s rights specialist, BW, Haitian minority activists). Others argue most measures and programmes do not require women to identify themselves properly to access relief services (Field interview BZ, criminal prosecutor, BU, DNP General). There is limited information on this question, which requires more investigation.
22 Raso is the title that designates specifically the lowest rank in the DNP: entry-level street officers. This popular expression is widely used by Dominicans and is unique to this Caribbean country. Experts calculate their income covers 36% of what one family needs to live above the poverty line in the country (Tapia Citation2017).
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