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.

From Social Assistance to Control in Urban Margins: Ambivalent Police Practices in Neoliberal Chile

“…Evaluations of this model in the global North have produced mixed results (BULLOCK, 2013;MCCARTHY, PORTER, TOWNSLEY and ALPERT, 2020), it remains difficult to establish the actual reach and success of the model in Latin America. On one hand, some studies on the Latin American experience have demonstrated serious attempts to change police institutions, albeit without much success (FRÜHLING, 2012), while others have shown the existence of many local variations that have distanced themselves from the principles of the Anglo-Saxon model (DIAS FELIX and HILGERS, 2020;DAMMERT and CASTAÑEDA, 2019). Many attempts to implement this approach have only focused on enhancing image of the police (FRÜHLING, 2012), and have prevented advancements toward more democratic police models in the region.…”

Comparative Reflections on Community-Oriented Policing (COP) in Post-Conflict Central America

“…Community policing (COP) is a strategy developed and adopted with the specific goal of improving conditions of trust between the police and public. Its modern roots lie in the United States in the 1970s [10,15,16], from where it spread into Canada and Europe, and on into Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Although Bayley [17] argues that there is no agreed definition of COP there appear to be similar conditions [18] for its testing and implementation i.e., it is a clear effort to respond to a lack of public confidence in the police.…”

“…Key sources on COP have focused on its impact, concluding that there is significant evidence that this strategy for policing improves local citizens perceptions of the police, their approval of their activities, their legitimacy as a state institution, but it has some limited impact on the levels of crime and related fears [22]. In Latin America there are studies which focus on conditions for COP success [23], as well as on problems of implementation [10,[24][25][26].…”

“…The literature written on the practice of the model takes for granted that there is a stable political context, and high levels of social cohesion [5,6]. It has been assumed that any resistance to the model will be produced internally within policing institutions themselves [7][8][9][10]. Acknowledging this, the comparative study of community policing in the country cases of Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala we will carry out in this article provides an important addition.…”

Possibilities of Advancing Police Reform in Guatemala through Community -Oriented Policing

“…Enhanced capacities for crime investigation have promoted professionalization within the police that open up possibilities to consolidate a preventive approach to security by developing its capacities for community-oriented policing. COP means different things in different contexts but can generally be conceptualized as "full-service personalized policing where the same officer patrols and works in the same area on a permanent basis, from a decentralized place, working in a proactive partnership with citizens to identify and solve problems" [12,13]. It can generally be considered functional to police reform in that it "marks a shift in emphasis [...] from reactive to preventive policing [...], from the police as representing external coercion to police embedded in and working in partnership with communities" [13].…”