| Review of: | Public Security and Police Reform in the Americas edited by John Bailey, Lucia Dammert |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | David Alan Sklansky |
| Reviewed in: | Governance |
| Date accepted online: | 14/01/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 20, Issue 03, Pages 545-556 |
Book Reviews
John Bailey and Lucia Dammert have assembled an important and provocative set of papers analyzing police reform and security policy in Brazil, Chile, Columbia, El Salvador, Mexico, and the United States. There are two papers for each country, one focusing on local policing and one addressing law enforcement at the national level. The contributors are a mix of academics, NGO-based researchers, government officials, and private consultants. The editors themselves have written the opening and concluding chapters, which frame the discussions and identify some common themes.
When law enforcement issues in the United States are placed in transnational perspective-which is not often enough-the points of comparison are typically in the United Kingdom or (less commonly) in Europe, not in Latin America. Bailey and Dammert claim there are advantages to placing U.S. police reform and security policies in a regional context, and they are right. For one thing, studies of Latin American policing are not nearly as common as studies of law enforcement in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. Thus, one simple and straightforward service this book performs is providing English-speaking scholars and policymakers a portal into the distinctive security and police reform challenges faced in Central and South America. And precisely because the challenges faced in Latin America differ in so many ways from those in the United States, the side-by-side comparison throws fresh light not just on Latin American policing but on the much better studied case of the United States.
Some important features of U.S. policing, often overlooked, are thrown into sharp relief by the regional perspective this book provides. For example, police reformers in Latin America confront authoritarian political traditions and strongly militarized police forces, and without close parallels in the United States. The complex, often incendiary relationship between armies and police forces-a central problem in Latin America-has been largely a nonissue in the United States, freeing police reformers and policymakers to focus on other concerns. That may be changing. Over the past decade, and particularly since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the line between state security and public safety has blurred significantly in the United States, and with it the line between policing and soldiering. These lines are still a good deal clearer in the United States than in many parts of Latin America, but here, as elsewhere, the Latin American case studies should provide scholars and policymakers in the United States with food for thought.
Another example: A common theme in the Latin American chapters of this book is the distinction between protective and investigative policing, functions often assigned to entirely separate forces. Latin America in this respect follows Europe and differs strikingly from the United States and the United Kingdom, where patrol and detection are typically carried out by the same police forces, at least at the local level, and governed for the most part by a unified set of legal constraints. This is such a pervasive feature of Anglo-American law enforcement that it often escapes comment and rarely receives serious examination. Transnational comparisons, with Latin America or with Europe, however, can help remedy that invisibility.
As they are less expected, though, the similarities between policing in the United States and in the Latin American case studies prove even more interesting than the differences. The United States differs in so many ways from its Latin American neighbors that it is startling to discover how thoroughly police reform in Latin America has become dominated by ideas, practices, and rhetoric originating in the United States: for example, Computer Comparison Statistics, zero tolerance, and (above all) community policing. Latin American police reform mirrors U.S. police reform in another respect, as well: It is almost entirely top-down and outside-in. Rank-and-file officers have played the same role in Latin American police reform as in U.S. police reform-which is to say virtually no role at all. Moreover, the dramatic privatization of policing the United States has experienced over the past few decades turns out to be paralleled in Latin America too.
Perhaps the most interesting parallel, though, is one that Bailey and Dammert stress in their concluding chapter: the extent to which imagery and perceptions dominate the agendas of security policy and police reform. In Latin America as in the United States, policing aims not just, or even chiefly, at public safety; it aims at reassuring the public and bolstering confidence in the government. Police reform points not just, and perhaps not even chiefly, at correcting abuses; it aims at building trust. Moreover, public fears of crime and disorder often have a life of their own, untethered from actual rates of illegality and victimization. These features of policing have not escaped notice in the United States. Peter Manning, in particular, has written perceptively and at great length about the "dramaturgy" of U.S. law enforcement. However, seeing the same processes at work in starkly different settings brings the lesson home. Like every good exercise in comparative institutional analysis, this book can teach readers as much about their own countries as about the world beyond their borders.