From National Security to Citizen Security

Just as some private responses to crime pose troubling issues for democracy and human rights, many state responses to rising and violent crime also violate principles of accountability and due process. After a period of democratization in which many governments sought to rein in and redefine the roles of the militaries, governmental responses to crime and violence today often threaten human rights in the name of more effective crime fighting.

In Latin America, governments have not hesitated to resort to authoritarian practices in response to crime waves. In the face of police ineffectiveness, governments have authorized the military to conduct policing activities in Brazil, Bolivia, Honduras, El Salvador and Mexico among others. Military responses to public security repress large scale social disorder but do little to prevent crime and nothing to guarantee citizens rights.⁽⁵⁹⁾ The (re)militarization of law-enforcement threatens the fragile achievements of the effort to remove the military from internal security tasks.

Extreme measures are particularly common in efforts to confront organized crime such as drug-trafficking or terrorism. In Pakistan, anti-terrorism legislation permits the use of lethal force to prevent acts of terrorism. Police are allowed to enter and search premises to seize sectarian materials. In addition to extraordinary police powers, a parallel judicial system has been created with special courts for summary trials and convictions in terrorism cases.⁽⁶⁰⁾ Similar measures were initiated in Colombia, with US support, with the creation of "faceless courts" to try drug traffickers that in fact were used extensively to harass trade unionists and other social activists.⁽⁶¹⁾

Anti-crime measures frequently undermine accountability and due process rights. Governments and police often react to rising crime by creating special police units which typically operate with limited accountability outside the normal chain of command and have a high risk of politicization. This is a common response to crimes such as kidnapping or drug trafficking with its high incidence of corruption.⁽⁶²⁾ U.S. antinarcotics tactics in Latin America frequently encourage the creation of such units and/or militarization of the "war on drugs."⁽⁶³⁾ Special units and targeted initiatives have had some success against narcotics traffickers in Colombia and Mexico. Nonetheless, all measures which reduce accountability are cause for concern in countries with long histories of political espionage and repression.

Due process rights fare little better. In Mexico, reforms proposed at the end of 1997 may make it "easier for suspects to be jailed on weaker evidence and without certainty that a crime had ever been committed." ⁽⁶⁴⁾ Mexico's President has also announced that he proposes to seek increased penalties for the most frequent and serious crimes. While certain clearly targeted anti-crime measures may be effective as noted above, there is little evidence that broad repressive law enforcement measures will improve the overall crime-fighting record of Mexico's corrupt and incompetent police. (In 1995, only 2.5 percent of crimes reported in Mexico City resulted in the indictment of a suspect.⁽⁶⁵⁾ Such realities frequently make government "reforms" of this sort a political tool which may satisfy some popular demand for retribution but will probably have no effect on crime and may seriously undermine rights.

In many countries, media coverage of crime is intense and feeds public fears. There is considerable popular support for increasing penalties for violent crime, including the death penalty, and for police brutality as long as it is perceived to be targeted against "criminal elements." A Mexican criminologist stated that "Mexicans think it is less unjust for an innocent person to be in jail than for a guilty person to be in the street."⁽⁶⁶⁾ A survey in India found that 84 percent of people agreed that criminals deserved harsh treatment from police.⁽⁶⁷⁾ This is often true of the poor who are the most frequent victims of crime despite the fact that they are also the principal victims of discriminatory and abusive police operations.

Governments attack human rights standards as protecting criminals at the expense of law-abiding citizens. Argentine President Carlos Menem recently stated that the answer to crime is an "iron hand" (la mano dura). He went on to remark that "some human rights organizations are going to raise an outcry against this, but I think that we have more guarantees here for criminals than for the police or the people."⁽⁶⁸⁾

For human rights organizations, particularly in Latin America and South Africa, crime and social violence and the various responses to crime and violence are coming to constitute the most significant threat to fundamental liberties, the rule of law and democratic consolidation. When police and private security firms or paramilitary groups commit abuses or target specific sectors, democracy is undermined and further violence is generated. Democratic governments and institutions display little ability to confront growing levels of collective insecurity and crime without resort to undemocratic and abusive policies.

Yet, to focus entirely on issues of accountability without consideration of how to fight crime more effectively risks ignoring the serious threat that crime poses to democracy. The political impact of social violence is important in regions characterized by weak democratic cultures. As a Colombian analyst notes:

[A]lthough the violence of confrontation between state and citizen today occupies a central place in Colombia, other types of violence - acts that are committed by individuals or groups seeking to protect or restore a social order or by citizens trying to resolve strictly personal conflicts or to assert their positions - occupy a place of equal importance. Neglect of this finding has led to an overemphasizing of human rights and a downplaying of those dimensions - such as safety - that define the citizenry... Private violence is a problem of democracy not only in the field of the exercise of civil rights but also to the extent it makes routine co-existence impossible. There is nothing to guarantee the possibility of a democratic political order if there is no social order of the same nature.⁽⁶⁹⁾

Addressing high and rising rates of crime and social violence in countries where the criminal justice system is ineffective and brutal presents some thorny problems.

On the one hand, law enforcement initiatives will be weakened if conditions in which they are carried out continue to spawn high levels of criminality, which the police are only able to react to and not pre-empt. On the other hand, international experience has shown that sophisticated crime prevention strategies have only a limited effect when the state institutions of policing and criminal justice are poorly developed, with little deterrent effect.⁽⁷⁰⁾

Most criminologists, and an increasing number of police, agree that the police role in controlling crime will always be limited, and that after-the-fact law enforcement must be completed with both crime prevention initiatives and broader social policies to address the causes of crime. From a development perspective, it makes economic sense to design policies to reduce crime by addressing its root causes. Yet, in contexts of high and rising violent crime, government policies cannot focus solely on crime prevention programs whose effects are medium term at best. Governments will pay a heavy political price if they neglect or appear to neglect the need to improve law enforcement to address the crime that affects their voters now. Public security strategies have little choice but to address two fronts simultaneously. Governments must develop prevention programs to stop the upward trend in crime and reduce levels of societal violence and they must try to improve the effectiveness of law enforcement to respond to popular fear of crime. This dynamic emerged during ongoing discussions between the Inter-American Development Bank and the Salvadoran government about a loan for new public security initiatives, the latter has indicated that it may not accept the loan if the project focuses too exclusively on crime prevention at the expense of law enforcement.