The paper describes the process of security sector reform in Guatemala with reference to the efforts to implement community-based policing practices. The results point to the difficulties of shakingoff public understandings of security honed during the armed conflict and underscore the efforts of a still young police institution to position itself in a democratic context. The study posits that communityoriented policing strategies open opportunities to forward police reform in the high-violence, low-trust, weak-institutions, and post-conflict context of Guatemala. The argument is supported by field data gathered in indigenous territories in the Western Highlands, where traditional forms of social organization persist, and in metropolitan Villa Canales municipality, an urban, high-violence site of research.

The paper describes the process of security sector reform in Guatemala with reference to the efforts to implement community-based policing practices. The results point to the difficulties of shakingoff public understandings of security honed during the armed conflict and underscore the efforts of a still young police institution to position itself in a democratic context. The study posits that communityoriented policing strategies open opportunities to forward police reform in the high-violence, low-trust, weak-institutions, and post-conflict context of Guatemala. The argument is supported by field data gathered in indigenous territories in the Western Highlands, where traditional forms of social organization persist, and in metropolitan Villa Canales municipality, an urban, high-violence site of research.

In this article we discuss the comparative impact and significance of Community-Oriented Policing (COP) in Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua). We emphasize in particular the formal role of COP as a means to re-establish trust between the state and community, demonstrate professionalism and to evidence the democratic accountability of the police to the population. Although these formal goals remain the goal of community oriented policing, we demonstrate in this article that there has been an increased emphasis on more kinetic or militarized forms of policing in recent years. Hard handed, heavily armed and interventionist police policies have spread from El Salvador to Guatemala, and more recently Nicaragua. Moves towards more aggressive policing are explained by governments and police forces as a necessary response to the rising threat of gangs and drug cartels and horrifying levels of homicide statistics. However, as we highlight there is also evidence of these changes reflecting undemocratic shifts within national administrations and the repositioning of people within government and national institutions with links to these countries' earlier military governments.The net effect of these changes we argue is to erode the intentions of COP initiatives, and severely reduce levels of trust and accountability between people and the democratic state.