Policing Developing Democracies

Mercedes S. Hinton, Tim Newburn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415428491
• eBook ISBN: 9781134088720
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

There are enormous challenges in establishing policing systems in young democracies. Such societies typically have a host of unresolved pressing social, economic and political questions that impinge on policing and the prospects for reform. There are a series of hugely important questions arising in this context, to do with the emergence of the new security agenda, the problems of transnational crime and international terrorism, the rule of law and the role of the police, security services and the military.

This is a field that is not only of growing academic interest but is now the focus of a very significant police reform 'industry'. Development agencies and entrepreneurs are involved around the globe in attempts to establish democratic police reforms in countries with little or no history of such activity. Consequently, there is a growing literature in this field, but as yet no single volume that brings together the central developments.

This book gathers together scholars from political science, international relations and criminology to focus on the issues raised by policing within developing democracies examining countries in Eastern Europe, Asia, South America and Africa.

1 Introduction

Policing developing democracies

Mercedes S. Hinton and Tim Newburn

Introduction

In 2007, the chief U. S. training officer for the Iraqi National Police characterized his experiences of police capacity building as similar to “trying to build an airplane while you’re flying it” (Col. Chip Lewis quoted in Frayer 2007). After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s military dictatorship, the coalition had envisioned the rapid development of an impartial and professional local police force that would be capable of providing security, committed to the rule of law, and supportive of the goal of building a democratic Iraq (U. S. House of Representatives 2007: 71). The U. S. government spent $19 billion to develop the capacity of the Iraqi armed forces and police between 2003 and 2007 (ibid., 41).

However, because of massive planning failures based partly on an unrealistic assessment of Iraq’s political and sectarian landscape, followed by poor coalition oversight of the subcontracted security and reconstruction agencies, devastation of the economy, and a growing insurgency, the coalition’s goals proved extremely elusive. An independent audit by the Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq mandated by the U. S. Congress found that the Iraqi Police Service is “incapable today of providing security at a level sufficient to protect Iraqi neighborhoods from insurgents and sectarian violence” (Independent Commission 2007: 10). The commission found it to be compromised by criminal elements, militia, and insurgent infiltration, to be underequipped and undertrained, and that the police were counter-productively transferred from U. S. coalition oversight to premature control by a “dysfunctional,” “sectarian,” and “corrupt” Iraqi Ministry of the Interior.

While the situation in Iraq is certainly extreme, what it reveals is the impossibility of institutional transplant and rapid-fire reform in a setting illprepared to absorb such changes. Yet unrealistic police reform proposals are devised on a routine basis throughout the developing world. Some are drafted to score political points at home while others are propelled by international institutions, bilateral agreements with foreign governments, and international security consultants. Indeed, inflated expectations for police reform are frequently trumpeted by domestic politicians and international policy elites, regardless of how staggering the rates of crime, how politicized and heavy-handed the police force, and how corrupt and lawless the government that is meant to enact and monitor the promised reforms.

Money and expertise from donor nations are parachuted in with the aim of aiding transformation. David Bayley (2006) estimates that in 2002–3 the United Nations spent over two billion dollars on civilian police operations. He estimates that in 2004 the U. S. government spent upward of $635 million on development and support of police agencies abroad. However, the nature of such activity is highly variable and, as Bayley notes, quoting Carothers (1999), it appears to have “an uncertain and sometimes contradictory relation to democracy goals.” Taking the specific example of international efforts to promulgate community policing models, Brogden points out the very real dangers of such aid becoming another form of colonialism:

New missionaries have spread a particular policing creed. A uni-linear perception of police development has been assumed, a process occurring largely independently of local police mandates, cultures and patterns of organization. What appeared to offer promise in small-town America, and in the prosperous white suburbs, is being exported by a new brand of academic and police salespeople to all and sundry.

(1999: 179)

The limits and frequent absurdities of reform transplantation are clearly reflected in Gordon Peake’s East Timor chapter. Peake describes the reform process that followed the United Nations 1999 intervention to create a provisional police force. This force was to be responsible for all local policing, but it was staffed by officers from fifty different countries, most of whom lacked local knowledge and language. These international officers arrived with wildly diverse skills, ages, ranges of experience, standards, policing styles, and educational backgrounds, in a “merry-go-round” of different arrival and departure dates and lengths of mission; there was little agreement in theory or practice about even basic issues such as how to perform a traffic stop (Peake, Chapter 7).

As if the bureaucratic challenges were not Herculean enough, the UN was also mandated with the parallel task of building from the ground up a professional, accountable, politically neutral, rights-respecting domestic police force that would be capable of taking over local policing responsibilities in a multiethnic, multilingual society—this in a postconflict newly independent country with fragile state institutions, few resources, scant rural penetration, and deep economic, social, and governance problems. Six-and-a-half years and four separate UN missions later, the newly created national police force still lacked basic infrastructure, communications systems, “legal frameworks, mechanisms for control, and well-functioning managerial systems.” After the country suffered a wholesale breakdown of law and order in 2006, the UN returned for a fifth mission to try again. Peake’s assessment of preliminary results leads him to conclude that “the do-over may not work” and that “the current model of police rebuilding needs rethinking in terms of its contextual appropriateness and actual feasibility.”

While a cynic, with the benefit of hindsight, may ask if some of these reforms are set up to fail, these efforts also reflect a lack of scholarly knowledge about policing systems in the developing world or their interaction with the local political environment, particularly within young democracies. Policing literature has been dominated by research and writing from the United States and the Anglophone world and has tended to focus on the police forces in those parts of the world: primarily the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Although there has been a longstanding interest in comparative policing questions, this literature remains relatively sparse (though see Bayley 1985; Mawby 1990; Baker 2002; Caparini and Marenin 2004; Sheptycki and Wardak 2005; Bayley 2006; Hinton 2006). This gap represents a sophisticated level of knowledge that has not been transmitted to policymakers, journalists, teachers, and students, and it contributes to the perpetuation of the transplantation practices discussed above.

This volume takes up this story.

In the twelve chapters that form the body of this book, a variety of experts examine policing in young democracies across four continents: Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Asia. Each of these substantive chapters focuses on one particular jurisdiction and seeks to examine a number of questions:

• What is the historical and politico-economic context of the country in question?
• What is the predominant model of policing?
• What is the relationship of the police with the military?
• What are the major domestic challenges to achieving democratic forms of accountability over the police?
• To what extent are national policing practices affected by regional and international issues and actors?
• What has given the main impetus for police reform, and what processes of reform are under way?
• Finally, what are the prospects for police reform?

An overview of the role and nature of the police in the advanced industrialized democratic context will help us understand the key differences within the developing democracy context.

Police and democracy

It is hard to imagine the modern state without some form of established policing service. But “how and for what this is used speaks to the very heart of a condition of a political order” (Reiner 1993: 1). The police are the state’s primary legal enforcers and embodiment of the law, providing in principal protection, access to justice, and redress. Police actions to detect crime and bring perpetrators to the attention of the courts for punishment are critical to the effective functioning of any criminal justice system.

In addition to upholding due process, freedom of speech and assembly and managing public gatherings and demonstrations, a well-functioning police force that enjoys civic trust affords society the degree of order, predictability, and accountability needed for the functioning of a market economy in a democratic system. The treatment people receive from the police and other agents of the criminal justice system has an important effect on their perception of the government’s fairness and effectiveness and, correspondingly, on whether they accept the right of the state and its enforcers to govern behavior (Bayley 1995; Marenin 1996; Tyler 1990). If people can have trust and confidence in rules, institutions, and authorities, they are likely to believe that their long-term personal interests will be well served by voluntary compliance with the laws of the state.

The rule of law is especially important to the democratic process if one accepts that the main feature of a democracy is a government’s continuing responsiveness to the preferences of its citizens—who are considered to be political equals. This is the starting point of Dahl’s (1971) conception of political democracy. He defines it as a system of government where there are free and fair elections for most positions of governmental power, and he specifies that elections must occur on a regular basis under conditions allowing candidates and organized groups to compete meaningfully and freely in a polity where no major adult group is excluded from the right to vote. Underpinning political competition and participation is a guarantee of the civil and political liberties necessary for political debate and competition, such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of association and assembly (Dahl 1971: 3).

These characteristics of the democratic process hold several implications for police functioning. Jones et al. (1994: 185–86) identify seven criteria for democratic police service provision:

• equity—the fair allocation of services in relation to needs and enforcement that is proportionate to the frequency and severity of offenses;
• delivery of service—efficient and effective delivery of police services, given that a “well policed society is more just than a badly policed one”;
• responsiveness—based on the democratic principle that government should reflect the wishes of the citizenry;
• distribution of power—preventing the police from buttressing a repressive complex;
• information about the police and their activities—enabling the achievement of many key democratic criteria;
• redress—public complaints about police wrongdoing are addressed, unfair and malevolent policies are reversed, and some form of compensation is provided where appropriate;
• participation—some mechanism for public input into policing policies.

Examining the extent to which these values are visible within policing policies and practices is one potentially important approach to assessing the democratic nature of policing. Arguably, it is precisely the absence of some or all of these values in many of the policing systems described in this volume that underpins calls for reform.

The controversies of policing

While this volume explores the situation of developing democracies, it is important to note from the outset that even in the advanced industrialized democratic context the role of the police is riddled with controversy and contradiction. The coercive capabilities of the police highlight the tension present within all democracies between the state’s power to compel through force and its representative, consensual, and liberal character. In the words of Goldstein,

The police, by the very nature of their function, are an anomaly in a free society…. The specific form of their authority—to arrest, to search, to detain, and to use force—is awesome in the degree to which it can be disruptive of freedom, invasive of privacy, and sudden and direct in its impact upon the individual. And this awesome authority, of necessity, is delegated to individuals at the lowest level of the bureaucracy, to be exercised, in most instances, without prior review and control.

(1977: 1)

The powers given to the police for protecting freedom contain very real potential for the abuse of such power. This paradox is evident in the field of civil liberties more generally: the expression of such liberties contains within itself the potential seeds of its own destruction (Gearty 2007).

In their adversarial role, the police direct much of their surveillance and actions toward the underclass, minorities, young people, and other groups that are perceived to contribute most to criminality. In so doing, they constitute a socially divisive force and add to structural tensions latent in society (Bittner 1975: 10).

There are a number of other aspects of the police organization that complicate any discussion of the proper police role in a democracy. Even in most developed countries, the police are on the whole hierarchically organized, secretive in their esprit de corps, jealous of external interference, and on many occasions contemptuous of legal and procedural constraints on the gathering of criminal evidence and treatment of suspects and criminals (Skolnick and Bayley 1988: 49–51).

The police are also subject to intense pressures: the public and politicians demand results, while they are required to comply with procedural laws concerning arrests, the treatment of suspects, and other human rights standards, even during fast-paced operations dealing with individuals who confront them with verbal or physical aggression. Accountability may be undermined if the police circumvent these laws in the course of their work, as is possible simply through the exploitation of the wide discretion police officers typically have in their day-to-day activities (Goldstein 1977; Skolnick 1966).

Thus the police role in any democracy is bound to be contentious and imperfectly aligned with the broader procedures, objectives, and practices of a democratic polity. In the developed economies scandals concerning overpolicing, underprotection, racial and ethnic profiling, lack of respect for legal procedures, capitulation to political pressure, and arbitrary and abusive practices are far from uncommon. But if these issues are a challenge in the First World, where the factors that work to restrict the coercive potential of the police are well-established, they are all the more complicated in developing countries whose democratic institutions are still young.

Characteristics of developing democracies

Developing democracies typically suffer from a range of intractable political and socioeconomic problems. Certainly these societies are not a monolithic block; they vary from region to region, by the strength of their institutions, their political culture, ethnic homo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: policing developing democracies
• PART I Europe
• PART II Asia
• PART III South America
• PART IV Africa