By: Mark Ungar and Enrique Desmond Arias

In every part of Latin America, unprecedented levels of violence have even led to questions about the underlying quality of democratic rule. In response to this crisis, governments have enacted an array of policies, ranging from repressive mano dura crackdowns and adoption of new technology to the reform of criminal justice systems. But one of the most popular approaches to reform efforts has been community-oriented policing (COP), a strategy popularised in the USA in the 1990s, which is based on close collaboration between the police and the neighbourhood residents. COP focuses on the causes of crime
rather than simply responsding to it by empowering citizens, building police
community partnerships, improving social services and using better crime statistics. Street patrols, policy councils and youth services are some of the many COP programmes being adopted in Latin America and other regions. As other authors emphasise, this reform also entails restructuring of police forces to make them more flexible and responsive. Skogan and Hartnett (1997), for example, stress decentralisation of authority and foot patrols to facilitate citizen-police communications and public participation in setting police priorities and developing tactics.

The results of these efforts, however, have been very uneven. Some programmes have shown considerable success while others have faced many difficulties and either been defunded or left to expire of their own accord. Why do some projects succeed where others fail? More importantly, what can Latin American policy-makers learn from past experiences in the region in order to develop more effective and successful policies for the future?

This edition of Policing and Society takes a step towards answering these questions by bringing together security officials, practitioners and scholars to offer detailed analyses of community reform efforts at the local, regional and national levels throughout Latin America. The articles cover programmes in Colombia, Chile, Venezuela, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Argentina, Mexico and Brazil. By detailing the challenges facing reform and how to overcome them, these cases provide an important compendium about community policing in Latin America that will help practitioners and policy-makers build effective durable programmes. This introduction highlights critical issues that the individual articles develop further. Those challenges, as contributors discuss, fall along two main dimensions: support for community policing by key actors, from Presidents to neighbourhood residents, and a continuity of that support through the entire process of community policing creation, from initial proposals to programme evaluation.

Policing & Society, Vol. 22, No. 1, March 2012, 1
13

By Patricio Domínguez and Carlos Scartascini 

Crime levels are a perennial development problem in Latin America and a renewed concern in the United States. At the same time, trust in the police has been falling, and questions abound about citizens' willingness to support government efforts to fight crime. We conducted a survey experiment to elicit willingness to contribute toward reducing crime across five Latin American countries and the United States. We compare homicide, robbery, and theft estimates and find a higher willingness to contribute for more severe crimes and for higher crime reductions. In addition, we examine the role of information on the willingness to contribute by conducting two experiments. First, we show that exposing respondents to crime-related news increases their willingness to pay by 5 percent. Furthermore, while we document a 7 percent gap in willingness to pay for crime reduction between people who under- and over-estimate the murder rate, we find that this gap can be wholly eliminated by informing them about the actual level of crime. On average, our estimates suggest that households are willing to contribute around $140 per year for a 20 percent reduction in homicide. This individual-level predisposition would translate into additional investment in public security efforts of up to 0.5 percent of GDP.

Washington DC: IDB, 2022.  38p.

By: Julienne Weegels

Nicaragua has implemented a community-oriented policing model in addition to providing a prison system that is based on the premise of prisoners’ re-education. Though these are part of the criminal justice system, they are also presented as social policies with the objective of social (re) insertion of marginalised urban youth particularly. On the premise that detention is temporary and beneicial, these policies claim to prevent (youth) criminality and to reform its perpetrators. Yet they mostly push these youths into a spiral of continued state interventions. Through an analysis of youth-oriented public policy and an examination of the expansion of criminal justice services, complemented by ethnographic research material collected with young (former) prisoners, this article demonstrates how and why social policy for youth is being carried out by the criminal justice system. This development is underpinned by the securitisation of social policy and a political culture of social conservatism that renders marginalised youth unworthy of social protection.

OXFORD DEVELOPMENT STUDIES, 2017; https://doi.org/10.1080/13600818.2017.1391192