From National Security to Citizen Security

Why have many transitions to democracy not brought increased attention more rapidly to the need for reform of public order institutions and practices? Reasons include the partial nature of many "democratization" processes, an "instrumental" view of police institutions, and the police role in maintaining order in societies characterized by deep social injustice.

Many democratization processes are limited. "[I]n some African countries, political transition has involved a reconfiguration of political, economic and military elites, rather than an opening up of the political system and broadening of participation."⁽²²⁾ Some "new democrats" in Africa are themselves from military backgrounds, and continue to rely on regime policing to maintain control.⁽²³⁾ In other countries in Africa and Latin America initial transitional governments lack the power and authority to initiate institutional reforms that may be perceived as challenging the prerogatives of still-powerful military sectors. In other cases, political actors and elite sectors have a deeply vested interest in controlling the police and assuring the continued impunity of themselves and business and even criminal cronies. For their part, left-wing political sectors have often had little interest in law and order issues and have criticized conservatives' focus on law enforcement as discriminatory and repressive and for its failure to address the social conditions giving rise to crime.⁽²⁴⁾

In other cases, with many issues competing for government attention, police are rarely at the top of political agendas. Police are not generally decisive actors in coups or democratic transitions and are rarely in a position to overthrow a government. An instrumentalist theory of policing assumes that police reflect regimes and their behavior will come to reflect the new values of democracy once the legal framework has been reformed to incorporate those values.

Police violence and abuse of authority in Africa, Asia and Latin America frequently fails to decline following democratic transitions. In fact, in some countries - for example, Brazil -- widespread violence against citizens has acactually grown following the institutionalization of democratic rule. Across these regions, police continue to use repressive security practices such as summary execution of presumed criminals, torture of suspects in detention either to obtain confessions or to preemptively punish individuals, and the fabrication of evidence to build cases. Police are among the main perpetrators of "social cleansing killings" of street children, prostitutes and homosexuals (in Colombia, these individuals came to be termed "desechables" - throwaway people; in the Philippines, the killing of suspects is termed "salvaging"). In most cases, police continue to enjoy impunity.⁽²⁵⁾ The change in police abuse following transitions is that it comes to focus more on alleged criminals than political dissidents (although social activists often continue to be repressed). While governments do not always explicitly order continued abuse, they appear unable or unwilling to take steps to prevent or punish it.

Paul Chevigny argues in the Edge of the Knife; Police Violence in the Americas that police work reproduces social order.⁽²⁶⁾ Too often, the removal of the military from government does not change the underlying social order which police practice continues to reflect. Although the perpetrators and the majority of victims of violent crime tend to be of the same social class -- poor and marginalized -- middle and upper classes perceive crime as a problem that predominantly affects them. Police become the key instruments of "socially-rooted authoritarianism" that targets the "dangerous classes."⁽²⁷⁾ The poor see the law as an instrument of oppression at the service of the state and the elite interests it serves.

Analysts are noting the emergence of a model of constrained or uncivil democracy (coined democradura in Latin America) in which electoral democracies continue to violate human rights systematically despite considerable success in democratizing political institutions.

In such uncivil democracies, violence, injustice, and impunity are norms. As a result, uncivil electoral democracies share certain significant features of citizenship. Their institutions of law and justice undergo delegitimization; violent crime and police abuse escalate; the poor and the ethnically other are criminalized, dehumanized, and attacked; civility and civil protection in public space decline; people abandon the public to retreat behind private security; and illegal measures of control receive massive popular support. Across the nation-state, the civil components of citizenship are unevenly and irregularly distributed among citizens.⁽²⁸⁾

The failure to deepen democracy and the rule of law and extend citizenship rights across all social sectors shakes public confidence in the police and judicial system, weakens the rule of law and increasingly undermines support for democracy. As long as this skepticism is confined to poor and marginal social sectors, the political consequences to governments remain limited even as the institutions of criminal justice may continue to degenerate. When crime rates increase and produce broader social and economic effects, the attention of middle and upper classes focuses on the failings of the police and criminal justice system. People feel unprotected or even further victimized by the system that is meant to protect them. At this point, governments experience a sharp rise in the political price they pay for ineffective, brutal and corrupt law enforcement.