Comparative Policing

The Struggle for Democratization

M. R. Haberfeld, Ibrahim Cerrah

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781412905480, 9781412905473
• eBook ISBN: 9781544340241
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Criminologia

"A wonderful resource, user friendly and very well written." - Timothy J. Horohol, John Jay College

A unique approach to studying police forces around the globe

How do police forces around the world move toward democratization of their operations and responses? Analyzing police forces from 12 different countries, Comparative Policing: The Struggle for Democratization assesses the stages of each country based on the author?s development of a "Continuum of Democracy" scale.

Key Features
Using five basic themes, this book uses the following criteria to rank and evaluate where each country falls on the continuum, clarifying how policing practices differ:
· History of a democratic form of government
· Level of corruption within governmental organizations and the oversight mechanisms in place
· Scope of and response to civil disobedience
· Organization structures of police departments
· Operational responses to terrorism and organized crime

Intended Audience: This unique analysis of policing is an ideal text for undergraduate and graduate courses in Comparative Criminal Justice, Police Studies, Policing and Society, and Terrorism in departments of criminal justice, criminology, sociology, and government.

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1	Introduction

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Policing Is Hard on Democracy, or Democracy Is Hard on Policing?

Maria (Maki) Haberfeld and Lior Gideon

Conceptual Framework

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Global trends in terrorism and transnational crime have direct effects in both local and international contexts. Although the problems of terrorism, organized crime, and corruption are not new phenomena anywhere in the world, governments have shifted the nature of their law enforcement structures, functions, and practices in manners that reflect local internal and external political and socioeconomic forces. In many countries, responses to serious threats have typically resulted in an increasingly centralized and specialized force, even to the extent of merging police and military responsibilities. Such responses in times of threat have occurred in even strongly democratic societies, such as the United Kingdom, even though it has long been taken for granted that the roles of the military and police should be clearly separated in societies built upon the basic tenets of democratic governance (Kraska, 2001).

Issues of national security involving threats from other nations fall clearly within the domain of military responsibility, whereas those surfacing as a result of general criminality or lawlessness are the responsibility of local law enforcement. Where the functions and responsibilities of the military and police have merged, governments are characterized as repressive by those claiming to operate according to the principles of the rule of law. Within a changing global context, the difficulty of balancing due process and public safety needs is a paramount issue that challenges the very legitimacy that is fundamental to the effectiveness of law enforcement. Drawing upon the lessons learned and best practices of comparative policing systems is particularly important in contemporary times.

The extent to which changes in perceptions of the legitimacy of authorities affect the level of compliance with the law in everyday lives is an important question, particularly where we are dealing with countries at different levels of democratization (Cohn & White, 1997). Much of this perceived legitimacy is based on notions of government transparency and citizens’ beliefs that they can participate in the establishment of a lawful society both on an individual community level and at the level of national social change.

For example, although democratic rule has returned to many countries in Latin America, “Relations between governments and society, particularly the poor and marginalized members of society, have been characterized by the illegal and arbitrary use of power” (Pinheiro de Souza, 2006, p. 1). While the end of dictatorships brought hopes of human rights and a rule of a lawful society, the reality is that there is a significant disparity in many of these countries “between the letter of the bill of rights, present in many constitutions, and law enforcement application and practice” (Pinheiro de Souza, 2006, p. 1). Access to “justice” in many cases is bought with money, a tool more available to narcotraffickers than the average citizen.

Many countries throughout the world have accepted a semimilitary model of policing in which police administrators see their role as fighting the enemy (crime) regardless of the constraints on arbitrary enforcement meant to be offered by the law and the criminal justice system. Although decreasing, this military ethos has helped to maintain a legal context in which the practices of torture and use of deadly force to suppress social movements has not disappeared. The use of special squads is common throughout Latin America, with many of them becoming the law unto themselves. Specifically this is illustrated in the Brazilian case.

A driving force behind the abuses and citizen perceptions of police impunity in general stems from corruption, beginning with low-level bribes and extending to include protection rackets. Chevigny (1999, p. 62) argues that corruption and police brutality are interrelated because “together they show the power of the police, their independence from the rest of the criminal justice system, and their ability to administer justice as they see fit.” Paying bribes is a common practice in countries such as Mexico, not just as a means of bypassing the criminal justice system but also for avoiding a potential beating at the hands of officers for those who refuse to pay.

The above legal context will obviously not go a long way toward socializing citizens as to the value of rules and laws and their enforcement in society. The importance of this cannot be underestimated; legislation is meaningless unless the government is able to “anticipate that the citizenry as a whole will . . . generally observe the body of rules promulgated” (Fuller, 1964, p. 201). Given the fact that laws are created to enforce behavior that many people would often rather avoid, legal authorities are best served by “establish[ing] and maintain[ing] conditions that lead the public generally to accept their decisions and policies” (Tyler, 1990, p. 19). A government that needs to rely on coercion as a means of maintaining compliance with the law will be faced with an insurmountable task, both in terms of resources and practicality.

In a climate of global change, in which traditional boundaries and the presence of a clearly defined enemy are no longer realities, law enforcement has also tried to evolve internationally. For example, from a U.S. perspective, turning points such as the passage of the Patriot Act and the continued reexamination of the Posse Commitatus Act have led to the further blurring of military/police lines that began after the Cold War with the military taking on some drug enforcement responsibilities.

As policing moves away from its traditional responsibilities related to the control of local disorder, it will become increasingly less effective in meeting its objectives. Although it is easy to see how local law enforcement has seen a need to change its practices—viewing itself as the front line and first responder in the war on terror—the danger of further building a military ethos for policing is that it challenges the very legitimacy that makes it effective as noted above. Countries that have battled issues of terrorism for many years, such as Israel, recognize this distinction, seeing law enforcement as a support function to the “takeover” and engagement units responding to terror.

A growing body of useful comparative policing texts introduces the diversity and complexity of policing systems around the world. Important works such as Policing Change, Changing Police (Marenin, 1996) provide an overview of selected policing systems, highlighting the relationship between police and the state. Works such as Mathieu Deflem’s Policing World Society (1998) explore the challenges and issues involved in crossnational cooperation and international policing. Recent efforts such as Das and Lab’s International Perspectives on Community Policing and Crime Prevention (2002) contrast community policing models in countries as diverse as Canada, Israel, India, and Mexico. Other approaches, such as Ebbe’s Comparative & Criminal Justice Systems (1996) and Dammer, Fairchild, and Albanese’s Comparative Criminal Justice (2006) examine police systems within the context of the entire criminal justice system.

These efforts have provided important foundations for the fields of comparative policing and international policing studies, yet the following chapters will offer still new directions. In addition to providing a comprehensive comparative context of policing in the selected countries that will serve as a basic introduction to new students to the field, the material is presented in such a way as to highlight the critical global trends discussed, and thus link the comparative framework with current developments in the fields of democratic governance, legitimacy, human rights, and transnational crime.

The book will also provide some important political, social, and historical contextual information, so that connections between external authorizing environments and police responses can be introduced to the readers.

Topics introduced and discussed through the chapters circle around the following themes:

• Level of democratization
• Police professionalism, including preparation to perform the police function, merit recruitment, formal training, structured career advancement, systematic discipline, full-time service, extent to which police operations are conducted in public, and specialization
• Community oriented policing
• Use of force
• Accountability
• Human rights
• Forces for change and success/failure of these responses
• Responses to terrorism and organized crime, including the effects of such responses on legitimacy of the police force
• The extent of collaboration between the military and local policing

Countries have been selected for inclusion in the volume across a continuum of the democratization of policing practices. The country chapters are presented in a certain order that reflects their position on what the editors defined as the “Continuum of Democracy.” By introducing the placement of countries on a continuum, the editors illustrate how no country can operate perfectly within a perfect rule of law. Social forces and the negative actions of human agents can move a country’s law enforcement agencies away from democratic governance operating with community consensus and toward more coercive, autocratic practices. Being cognizant of these factors in the context of emerging responses to global terrorism and crime is a necessity and a key ingredient of the current volume.

The Continuum of Democracy: An Innovative Approach

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To facilitate cross-fertilization of best practices and lessons learned with respect to policing, a democratization continuum is operationalized, and each country is analyzed along the continuum. Again, each country was selected based on its potential applicability to the continuum and the degree to which best practices and/or lessons learned could be drawn according to the book’s themes, as described above.

A country’s position on the Continuum of Democracy is therefore operationalized as its overall score based on the following five dimensions: the history of a democratic form of government, the level of corruption within governmental organizations and the oversight mechanisms in place, the scope of and response to civil disobedience, organizational structures of police departments, and operational responses to terrorism and organized crime.

On the scale of 1 to 12 (based on the number of countries represented in this book) the editors assigned a rank order to each country as a representation of the number they scored, measured on the five practical dimensions representing the operationalized definition of the Continuum of Democracy. Therefore, they identified China as the country that scored the lowest on each of the five dimensions, because it has no history of a democratic form of government, a high level of corruption in governmental organizations, and a history of a violent response to civil disobedience, representing a rather archaic structure of policing and a repressive response to problems of terrorism and organized crime. On the other end of the spectrum, representing the highest level on the continuum, they placed the United States, followed closely by or even competing for first place with Canada. Although the history of its democratic government is not as long as the United Kingdom’s, the decentralized nature of the U.S. police force, the oversight mechanisms in place to deal with instances of corruption, the accountability required when dealing with civil disobedience, the structure of police organizations, and the modalities of response to the phenomenon of organized crime and terrorism earned the country its first place on the Continuum. It is imperative to note that the five dimensions are measured within the context of policing in the most recent years; therefore, the history of a democratic form of government (the first dimension) provides a context for the other four dimensions.

Additional Dimensions of the Innovative Comparative Approach

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It is with the above framework in mind that international scholars have written chapters examining the differing contexts and police practices throughout the world. Although this edited work will allow for the traditional international comparisons common to current collections in the field, it is unique in that it is presented from an analytical context that challenges readers to critically assess global trends in policing. Based upon a review and operationalization of the contents provided throughout the chapter, readers and students of policing can attempt to identify the best universal practices (applicable to any democratic setting) for dealing with newly emerging issues based on the best practices and issues of the discussed countries. However, the need to clearly separate the roles of police and military, and the continued transparency and accountability of local law enforcement, will remain a central focus in international challenges to attain legitimacy. The reader will also be introduced to the basic principles of human rights law and practice in order to frame all of the above discussion.

Another central innovation of this work’s conceptual framework is that it highlights how global trends in terrorism and transnational crime affect both local and international policing contexts. For example, departments internationally are rapidly trying to deal with the new threat posed by terrorism on the local level through first response, investigation, and coordination with other local and federal jurisdictions. Coordination with international policing efforts will also be essential. Therefore, rather than treating comparative and international policing as wholly separate fields as found in the rest of the literature, the volume’s editors draw these linkages; the final section of the text thus offers an overview of current trends in international policing as a possible, partial, and practical solution to the democratization of the police process across the world.

Countries represented in this volume have been selected based upon both geographical location and underlying issues that can inform the larger analytical context of the work. By taking a brief look at some critical issues and concepts outlined in the following chapters, it is possible to compile a list of fundamental themes that shape and influence the democratization process of policing in each of the depicted countries. The same list however can be easily applied to many other countries struggling to reconcile the notion that democracy is hard on policing and that policing is hard on democracy.

The globalization process exposes many countries that have had marginal exposure to the Western world to rapid and demanding social change and thus new social and governmental challenges. Consequently, law enforcement, as one of the greatest social experiments, is a crucial indicator of the level of democratization.

In very concrete and operational terms, a country’s level of democracy can be assessed by examining its law enforcement system(s) and its modus operandi. Similarly, the key to the level of developmental and economic success of the Western nations is their adoption of democracy. Within such nations, the police operate under internationally recognized democratic principles to ensure a harmonious society in which political, social, and economic life can flourish (Crawshaw et al., 2006, as cited in Chapter 5).

Cullen and McDonald (2008) argue in Chapter 5 that “democratic civilian policing is an essential component of good governance operating under a range of basic principles” (p. 121). Further argument advances the place of the military as having the primary role in securing the state from external threats, while the civilian police is destined to have “a primary and accountable role in citizen security and serving the law” (p. 121). Extraordinary circumstances, they argue, may require the military personnel to provide assistance to the civilian police in joint public safety operations.

In many countries, respon...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Policing Is Hard on Democracy, or Democracy Is Hard on Policing?
• 2. The Chinese Police
• 3. Neofeudal Aspects of Brazil’s Public Security
• 4. Paths to Fairness, Effectiveness, and Democratic Policing in Mexico
• 5. Postconflict Democratization of the Police: The Sierra Leone Experience
• 6. Policing the Russian Federation
• 7. Emergence of Modern Indian Policing: From Mansabdari to Constabulary
• 8. Democratization of Policing: The Case of the Turkish Police
• 9. Traditional Policing in an Area of Increasing Homeland Concerns: The Cas of the Israeli Police
• 10. The French Police System: Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place—The Tension of Serving Both the State and the Public
• 11. United Kingdom: Democratic Policing—Global Change From a Democratic Perspective
• History and Political Context of Policing
• Racial and Ethnic Context of Policing
• Organizational Structure and Issues
• Community Policing
• Terrorism
• 12. Democratic Policing: The Canadian Experience
• 13. Democracy’s Double Edge: Police and Procedure in the United States
• 14. International Cooperation in Policing: A Partial Answer to the Query?
• Appendix A: Atlas of Regional Maps
• Index
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors