Book reviews

Abstract

There is increasing recognition that police reform is as important as military support for bringing stability to developing nations; yet, a formula for providing the type of international assistance that results in police respecting the rule of law, preventing crime and helping establish peaceful communities has eluded those donor countries that have poured billions of dollars into security sector reform. David Bayley's book was published in 2006, but its content is as important today as it was when it was published for stimulating thought on how to make international police reform interventions more successful.David Bayley has written what he calls a 'how to' book, and states its objective is to 'pinpoint the lessons that have been learned about both the substance and practice of providing assistance to the police and, more largely, the justice sector … abroad.' The importance of this activity is rooted in the belief that reforming the police and more widely the justice sector will facilitate the development of democratic governments. The importance of this study undertaken by Professor Bayley relates also to the vast amount of resources that our various countries devote to foreign assistance to policing and the lack of transparency and accountability regarding who is funding what and with what impact. In fact in his discussion of evaluating 'democratic policing reform' he offers the reader a simple test: do parents teach their children that when the children are away from home and need help, they should seek out the police (p. 23)? In many cases the answer before the assistance was granted and after would be 'no. ' Bayley argues that while there is a literature that analyzes the 'front-end' of the peacekeeping process, what is missing is an empirical analysis of the final stages; in other words, the process of police reconstruction and reform at the level of ensuring ongoing rights protections and building security institutions at the local policing level. He thus takes on the massive task to fill what he calls this 'institutional gap.' This task was made even harder by a lack of transparency coupled with the lack of reliable data on which agencies were providing what type of police-related assistance to which countries.He begins by describing several very different scenarios where failed states and/or violence and corruption have resulted in basically no police service to which citizens can turn for assistance and security. The task of creating a 'how to' instructional manual for implementing a new, effective, legitimate, and democratic police force would be difficult but perhaps not impossible if the settings and context were similar. However when one country is described as being desperately poor, with illiterate and corrupt officials, and another is a substantially middle-class country that has been devastated by ethnic warfare, the tasks involved in the establishment of democratic policing are quite different and are perhaps not applicable to a manual format. The multilateral nature of the assistance act...