Community oriented policing theory and practice: global policy diffusion or local appropriation?

ABSTRACT

Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have now had 20 years of experience with community policing programmes (COP), yet high rates of public crime and violence, police violence and corruption, as well as public distrust of the police continue. The introduction to this special issue frames a set of contributions that, together, tell the story of COP’s problems and promise in the region. It argues that, in Latin America and the Caribbean, COP is often locally and regionally (mis)appropriated in ways that challenge common assumptions both of what COP is and of what it can be in contemporary highly unequal politico-economic systems. Indeed, regional and local specificities mean that COP has been used as much to legitimise harsh policing tactics, as it has been used to undertake serious reforms. At the same time, there are directions for general improvements that have the potential of a wide impact.

KEYWORDS:

• Community-oriented policing
• comparative policing
• policy diffusion
• democracy
• Latin America and the Caribbean

Introduction

As Latin America and the Caribbean celebrate 20 years of experimenting with community-oriented policing (COP), it is evident that COP has become a key policy response to high rates of crime and violence under the region’s democratic regimes, but that its implementation and results remain problematic (Dias Felix 2018). COP aims to bring police closer to the people, increase trust between community members and officers, encourage community participation in crime prevention, and enhance police effectiveness in creating secure environments (Dammert and Malone 2006, Müller 2010). This preventive answer is innovative in a region where repressive approaches have dominated (Davis 2010). Yet, as the contributions to this special issue point out, despite its potential, the rollout of COP programmes has not been entirely successful because of a series of contradictions.

In putting these contributions together, we enter a conversation begun with Policing and Society’s symposium on a comparative science of policing (vol. 28, issue 4, 2018), in that we want to highlight the issues of policy convergence/divergence and avenues for theory building. In their introduction to the symposium, de Maillard and Roché stress the usefulness of cross-national comparison for a better understanding of policing systems, concepts, and trends, and to enable theorisation of police-state-society relations. As one example of the need for more such comparison, they deal with the assumed cross-national convergence of policing strategies and techniques – including COP – that often falls apart when comparison shows significant variation in local application of programmes and approaches. Several of the articles in this special issue (Müller and Steinke, Bonner, and Simard-Fournier) contribute to the convergence/divergence debate by demonstrating how local social, political, and institutional particularities impact both the strategic use and the practical implementation of COP. At the same time, while De Maillard and Roché (2018) explore the benefits of a variable-centred approach to cross-national comparison, we propose a case-centred method. Most of the articles in this special issue are case studies or multi-case studies (Stake 2006) that are theoretically embedded and theoretically provoking as stand-alone pieces, but that also – together – tell a larger story.

Together, the contributions to this special issue argue that, in Latin America and the Caribbean, COP is often locally and regionally (mis)appropriated in ways that challenge common assumptions both of what COP is and of what it can be in contemporary, highly unequal politico-economic systems. Indeed, regional and local specificities mean that COP has been used as much to legitimise harsh policing tactics, as it has been used to undertake serious reforms.

This introductory article begins with an overview of the methodological orientation of both the individual contributions and also of the special issue as a whole, before focusing on the global diffusion of COP; the links between COP and democratic legitimacy; and the prospects for successful COP implementation. The conclusion points to some of the takeaways from a special issue with a regional focus for policymakers, police leaders, and researchers from across the globe.

Methods: linking evidence, concepts, theory, and comparison

As De Maillard and Roché (2018, pp. 394–395) indicate, the construction of comparison is heavily influenced by the kinds of questions one wishes to ask. De Maillard and Roché’s focus on variable-centred, cross national comparison is driven by their desire to fill gaps in knowledge about how specific police programmes and organisations, as well as configurations of police-state-society relations, differ across nations and about creating operationalisable concepts to enable this sort of study. The question underlying the present special issue – How has COP impacted public security, violence, and the democratic rule of law in the 20 years since its implementation in Latin America and the Caribbean? – was, however, less intended to generate outcomes measurable across cases than to motivate thinking about the prospects and problems of democratic public security by scholars with deep knowledge of the cases.

The contributors employ a variety of comparative methods, resulting in several conceptual, theoretical, and policy guiding outcomes, all of which fit together to tell a cross-case story. Individually, Müller and Steinke embed two interrelated case studies in transnational flows; Bonner combines within-nation and cross-nation comparison; and Fournier-Simard does a traditional case study. To complement these comparative case studies, Malone and Dammert provide a regional overview of policing practices and assess the ability of COP approaches to foster public trust in police in a cross-national analysis. The special issue as a whole learns from the cross-investigator cases of deep expertise in difficult contexts to tell a broader story about COP in the region. Because Latin America and the Caribbean is one of the most violent regions in the world and has high rates of police corruption as well as killings and other human rights abuses by police (e.g. Hilgers and Macdonald 2017), studying policing in relation to these abuses is difficult. All of the contributions to this special issue are based on extensive experience in the field and the authors have had to overcome the attendant obstacles of keeping themselves and their interlocutors safe (see Nordstrom and Robben 1996, Koonings et al. 2019).

The need to gain deep knowledge of difficult contexts often leads researchers to undertake small-n or case studies rather than big-n comparisons, but cross-researcher, cross-case evidence can be fruitfully combined to generate a bigger picture. Khan and VanWynsberghe ‘propose cross-case analysis as a mechanism for mining existing case studies so that knowledge from cases can be put into service for broader purposes’ (2008, p. 2). The authors argue that the best learning may take place when given the opportunity to connect ideas across different contexts and understand new ideas in light of already acquired case knowledge. Stake (2006) similarly contends that ‘multicase study research’ (4) is useful because one can put together a variety of cases studied for their own sake but with something in common and use them to improve understanding of the common factor – the ‘quintain’ (6). For these scholars, the ultimate goal is a purposeful approach to comparison that allows for both a deep understanding of the cases and a capacity to generalise across them. We argue for joining this logic to that of telling good stories. In Dyer and Wilkins’s (1991) rejoinder to Eisenhardt’s plea for building theory from variable-centred studies of four to ten cases, the authors argue that some of the best theory has grown out of highly detailed case studies that are ‘a good story with theory as the plot’ (617). Such stories have often upended accepted theories to the degree of engendering new directions of inquiry and theorising (Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003).

For us, the contributions to this special issue represent not a set of cases, but a set of theories about the quintain of democratic potential of COP in a context marked by violence and authoritarian histories. Together, they tell a story that shows the reader that the assumption that COP is necessarily an indicator of more democratic and egalitarian state-society relations is erroneous. The authoritarian nature of policing per se and the protection by Latin American and Caribbean governments of highly inegalitarian societies specifically, stand against the prospect of COP being a flagship of societal democratisation (Bonner 2019). Indeed, the nature of local and transnational processes of producing knowledge about COP in the region and of implementing programmes as part of broader counterinsurgency measures makes continued human rights abuses unsurprising (Müller and Steinke). The institutional and socio-cultural characteristics of police forces are also part of the problem, as relative autonomy from civilian oversight, corruption, and norms adherence create obstacles to COP implementation (Fournier-Simard 2019; Malone and Dammert 2020). In this context, it is questionable whether strictly centralised implementation of public security policy can be successful. At the same time, there are directions for general improvements that have the potential of a wide impact (Malone and Dammert 2020).

This logic also leads us in a different direction from De Maillard and Roché’s (2018) symposium argument for distinguishing policing from its contexts. To be sure, such a distinction is important for scholars wanting to operationalise various elements of policing to enable measurement. However, from our perspective of wanting to understand COP in the region – rather than measuring its specific instances – policing has to be embedded in its context. Following Mitchell’s (1991) critique of Weberian state-theory as unrealistically dividing state from society, we argue that the boundaries between the police and their various contexts (socio-economic, institutional, cultural) are fluid. This orientation is, again, influenced by the methodology of the majority of the contributors, who engage in ‘deep interviewing’ if not political ethnography.

Policy diffusion of … what?

Community policing has gained global popularity over recent decades. Its roots lie in early nineteenth century England, from where it spread to the United States in the 1970s (Walker 1985, McEwen 1995, Oliver 2000), then into Canada and Europe, and on into Latin America, Africa and Asia. Often conceptualised as ‘full-service personalized policing where the same officer patrols and works in the same area on a permanent basis, from a decentralised place, working in a proactive partnership with citizens to identify and solve problems’ (Trojanowicz and Bucqueroux 1990, p. 3), COP is now widely thought to be a useful preventive strategy and one of a number of approaches available to police institutions.

While a growing body of literature on the diffusion of ideas and models demonstrates that COP travels from one country or continent to another (Oliver 2000, Ratcliffe 2008), there is a debate about why it is adopted and how it is implemented. The early experiments of embedding police in communities that occurred in England and in the United States were responses to the dual problems of police accountability and of limited crime control success of repressive/reactive policing (Goldstein 1987, Holdaway 1984, Manning 1984, Davis et al. 2003). These incentives continue to be among the drivers of COP adoption, but it has become evident that locally specific police histories, institutions, cultures, and police-community relationships affect the chances of adoption as well as the prospects of meaningful police-community partnerships in the case of adoption. Whether community policing is adopted depends on local institutional characteristics (Burruss and Giblin 2009), monetary incentives (Church and Heumann 1992), officers’ attitudes toward the COP model (Hoath et al. 1998, Novak et al. 2003, Uluturk et al. 2014), and media portrayals of COP (Dowler 2003, Cashmore 2014). Once adopted, variations in pre-existing levels of police legitimacy (Bittner 1970, Skolnick and Fyfe 1993, Tyler 2004), police corruption (Martin 2001, Ungar 2013), and community profile (Kappeler and Gaines 2014) significantly affect the outcome of reforms. Decentralisation per se is subject to interpretation depending on how officers are embedded in multiple relationships with superiors, colleagues, and civilians that shape their practices and affect their use of decentralising mechanisms on the ground (King 2005, El Achkar 2012).

COP’s travels and struggles fit into a wider debate on policy diffusion. The global diffusion of promising models or successful public policies has become common, resulting from local and national level decision-makers looking outward and from external actors promoting their preferred policies, sometimes through funding or investment-related incentives and penalties. However, initial views that the diffusion of social, economic, and political models and policies was a process of reproduction are now widely disputed. Global diffusion and local ‘editing’ (Ban 2013, p. 302) or ‘translation and adaptation’ (Nagels 2015, p. 773) intermesh to generate policy outcomes that may adhere to the original model in some ways, but diverge from, or even oppose its precepts, in others. Depending on the political orientation and institutional history of the implementing administration, as well as local cultural and knowledge-producing processes, policies applied across different contexts may end up resembling each other only in limited ways (Ban 2013, Nagels 2015).

In the same vein, we argue that the ideas and models of community policing that travel around the world are appropriated and adapted at different levels, by different actors, into different contexts and for different reasons. In her contribution, Bonner demonstrates that the continuity of police violence is less an indication of weak democracies than an illustration of debates surrounding the meaning of COP. Müller and Steinke further argue that some governments have used the diffusion of COP as an opportunity to incorporate counterinsurgency methods into policing. Fournier-Simard shows that COP reforms have varying effects on different domestic populations (see also Malone and Dammert 2020). This special issue thus emphasises an empirical and contextualised focus, simultaneously enabling a reflection on COP in the region and a demonstration of the fluidity between the boundaries of the police and their socio-economic, political, institutional, and cultural contexts. As De Maillard and Roché (2018) state in their comparative policing symposium, ‘structures are important, but the substance of policing lies in the rules, norms and values that guide police activities on the ground’ (2018, p. 391).

Given its various adaptations and appropriations, we also argue that community-oriented policing is an idea, not a policy. It is an important idea because it marks a shift in emphasis among many policy experts and policy makers from reactive to preventive policing, from the ends toward the means of policing, and from the police as representing external coercion to police embedded in and working in partnership with communities. Yet the use of the idea differs so much from one location to another that it can deeply affect police structures and organisations or have no meaningful impact at all (Malone and Dammert 2020, Figure 1; Goldstein 1987).

COP, democracy, and legitimacy

In the Latin American and Caribbean context, COP has been tightly linked with the process of democratisation and the accompanying discourses of human rights and institutional legitimacy. Governments attempting to legitimise their approaches to public security in an era of democracy accompanied by ever-rising rates of crime and violence have used COP as a method to reform policing, but also as a way to sell policing to the public.

Public (in)security has been a central topic of political and policy debates in the region since democratisation in the 1980s (Hilgers and Macdonald 2017). Democratisation was accompanied by high expectations regarding improvements in public security and in the relations between police officers and citizens empowered by new rights. However, human rights abuses by the police continued in the 1990s. Deadly force and violence have been attributed in part to the repression deemed necessary to fight insecurity, but also to the informal rules of policing inherited from authoritarian regimes (Malone and Dammert 2020; Müller and Steinke, this issue, Méndez et al. 1999, Jobard 2002, Durazo Hermann 2010, Bonner 2014), including practices of delegating policing to informal leaderships (Arias 2017). These problems have been understood as demonstrating the need for reforms to public security policy and to police practises, both considered a weakness in the region’s democracies (O’Donnell 1993, 1994, McSherry 1997, Holston and Caldeira 1998, Méndez et al. 1999).

Community oriented policing was an obvious alternative because of the link that is often made between it and democracy. Seminal work presents it as a ‘grassroots form of participatory democracy’ due to the possibility of setting police agendas at the local level (Trojanowicz and Bucqueroux 1994) and contemporary research continues to present it as a form of democratic policing (Lum 2009, Skilling 2016). Summarising much of this literature, democratic policing can be understood as,

when elected political leaders are able to effectively use police to uphold the rule of law (implied to refer to both crime control and protest policing) and that the police, as public servants, respond to citizen complaints, are accountable, and use a minimal level of coercion consistent with the rule of law and, ideally, human rights and notions of justice and equality. (Bonner 2019)

From the perspective of governments, COP unites democratic legitimacy and crime control. Across the region, elected officials thus began to shift their public security paradigm from repression to prevention in the mid-1990s, focusing on the causes of violence and insecurity, and seeking to involve the affected communities in the improvement of policing practices (Arias and Ungar 2009, Dammert and Malone 2006). In government discourse, community-oriented policing, crime and violence reduction, and democratic principles including human rights, the rule of law, and citizen participation become joined.¹ Police activities – whether preventive or repressive – carried out under the new orientation are thereby legitimated.²

The contributions to this special issue challenge the COP-democracy link. Müller and Steinke call into question the assumed paradigm change from repressive to preventive and more democratic practices, using fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and Port-au-Prince (Haiti) to show that COP programmes have not broken with violent practices but have increased the militarisation of policing. Based on several years of research in Argentina and Chile, Bonner also argues that understandings of what policing should be have changed little and that violent police practises continue. Simard-Fournier’s work in the Dominican Republic demonstrates that the regional history of politicised and racialised policing has not changed with COP, under which minority rights are still not protected. Malone and Dammert provide evidence that even in those cases generally considered successful, such as Nicaragua and Chile, there are clear violations not only of the principles of democracy, but of the law.

Can COP succeed in Latin America?

While the literature tends to focus on the problems and limits of community policing, there is a scholarly discussion about the factors leading to successful implementation and outcomes in some cases. Studying the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS), Lurigio and Skogan (1994) conclude that its success is closely linked to the way police officers charged with the programme’s implementation assimilate the model. They argue that initiatives accounting for the existing culture and organisational environment of a police department will be better received by officers. Based on a comparison of twelve British police forces, Read and Tilley (2000) suggest that problem-oriented strategies are more likely than other approaches to generate a reduction of crime and disorder since they tackle the roots of violence. This is particularly true because police officers have to be more proactive than in traditional approaches, developing a ‘systematic process for examining and addressing the problems that the public expects them to handle’ (Goldstein 1979, p. 236). Based on the American experience, others hold that police agencies that are nationally accredited and funded can be better implemented because central state involvement removes the hurdle of resource limitations (Mastrofski et al. 2007).

However, in Latin America and the Caribbean, one of the primary obstacles to the successful implementation and outcomes of COP lies beyond processual and institutional engineering: the context of violence and socio-economic inequality. Indeed, social disorganisation not only explains high crime rates but also, to some extent, the failure of programmes with community policing objectives (Sampson and Groves 1989, Skogan 1990). According to this theory, conditions of unemployment, low or no access to public services, low levels of education, and poor housing quality can generate violence and crime; conditions that are common in highly unequal countries. Some point to a ‘culture of violence’, where citizens consider violent behaviour on the part of the state and citizens as a natural characteristic of the Latin American socio-political landscape, as contributing to the reproduction of high rates of disorder (Chelala and De Roux 1995, Arias and Goldstein 2010). Parts of the literature theorising the Latin American state and political system argue that crime and violence form an integral part of how regimes and institutions function (Wiarda 2010, Cruz 2011, Trinkunas 2013). This would make it difficult for any policing strategy, repressive or preventive, to succeed in reducing crime and violence without more far-reaching reforms. In this special issue, Müller and Steinke, Bonner, and Simard-Fournier analyse the problematic socio-economic, cultural, and institutional contexts that intermingle with COP, making democratic and human rights protecting policing practically difficult.

At the same time, variations in local realities include COP successes. For example, the Fica Vivo (Stay Alive) programme in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, has reduced homicides using a unique two-tiered structure. Its ‘social track’ is independent of police operations and run by civilians, thereby responding directly to the trust and legitimacy problems facing the police (Alves and Arias 2012). Similarly, although the success of Colombia’s COP experiments is being questioned, some cities have had good results with, for example, non-aggression and disarmament pacts or the constructions of schools for unprivileged children (Ruiz Vásquez 2012). This special issue contributes to the discussion of COP’s potential with an enlightening perspective from Latin American cases. Malone and Dammert point to concrete factors that can impact public trust in the police across the region: reducing police solicitation of bribes and increasing the speed with which police respond to citizens’ call.

Conclusion

The contributions hang together because they tell a theoretico-methodological and empirical story: context matters in the analysis of general patterns and of variation, as well as of obstacles and opportunities. A key finding of this contextualised comparison is that there is no universal COP paradigm; rather, variation is the norm. Nonetheless, COP represents an orientation to police reform that places importance on police-community relations. With the regional political shift toward right-wing regimes favouring hard-handed policing and with limited interest in public participation or civil and social rights (see Bonner 2019), the future of COP may be in question.

There is much that policymakers, police leaders, and researchers from other regions and countries can learn from the Latin American and Caribbean experiences with COP. This special issue provides much primary evidence of obstacles to COP success that have to be considered (articles by Müller and Steinke, Bonner, and Simard-Fournier), but also demonstrates what it takes to build trust (article by Dammert and Malone).

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 See, for example, the decree formalising the UPP program in Rio de Janeiro.

http://arquivos.proderj.rj.gov.br/isp_imagens/Uploads/DecretoSeseg45_186Upp.pdf.

2 See, for example, international press articles about the UPP.

Brazilian press: https://veja.abril.com.br/brasil/beltrame-transforma-favela-em-vitrine-mundial-do-rio/; https://veja.abril.com.br/brasil/policia-do-rio-ocupa-favela-para-criacao-de-nova-upp/; French press: https://www.courrierinternational.com/article/2009/09/09/des-favelas-plus-tout-a-fait-comme-les-autres; http://www.lefigaro.fr/international/2010/10/03/01003-20101003ARTFIG00256-les-favelas-de-rio-de-janeiro-en-voie-de-pacification.php; British press: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/brazil/10390718/Meet-Major-Pricilla-the-woman-pacifying-Rios-favelas-ahead-of-the-World-Cup.html.