Abstract
When does it become possible to reduce the level of police violence against civilians through legislation and other policy change? This is the question that Yanilda González takes on in this ambitious book analyzing the political conditions that enable significant police reform in democratic states. Through a carefully structured comparison of South American countries, González demonstrates that the key to creating a less violent police lies in a specific political correlation of forces, rather than in underlying institutional or social factors.
Most countries in South America experienced significant periods of authoritarian rule, often by right-wing military dictatorships, as recently as the 1980s, which gave way to a mixed picture of successful democratic transitions, flawed democracies, and in some instances (notably Venezuela and perhaps soon Brazil) democratic backsliding resulting in the rise of a new dictatorship. Yet, even in regimes with free and fair elections, freedom of speech and the press, and judicial independence, South America still displays high levels of violence, both overtly political and criminal. Along with the rest of Latin America, the region features the world’s highest homicide rate, as well as severe problems of police killings of civilians, again among the highest in the world. The coexistence of functioning democratic institutions with extreme police brutality is the point of departure for this study. As González notes, policing and security do not in practice constitute a “public good” but are subject to “distributive contestation” (38). Thus, when democratic political processes produce policy outcomes that allow police violence against civilians to continue unimpeded despite outcry from at least some citizens, the explanation probably has to do with those democratic political processes themselves.
González argues that South American politics features two factors that strongly impede efforts to restrain police violence: first, wealthier and more politically mobilized citizens often favour giving the police a free hand to deal with crime (the so-called mano dura); and second, the police themselves, as a continuing organizational actor, strongly resist constraints on their behaviour. Even where there is broad public support for police reforms, it tends to be more diffuse than these two countervailing forces. González develops a theory to predict when these forces can be overcome, namely when (1) a major scandal involving police-on-civilian killing causes public opinion to converge around demands for reform, and (2) the scandal coincides with a strong political opposition mounting a credible electoral challenge to an incumbent government. In other words, González argues that the mere presence of a scandal without an effective opposition challenge is not sufficient (a point to which I return below).
This is very much a book by a political scientist, which showcases how political science can contribute to the interdisciplinary study of policing in terms of both theory and research design. As noted above, political processes are the key variables. Moreover, González also employs a sophisticated comparative case study method that has been developed and refined in her home discipline, involving both cross-sectional and longitudinal comparisons among three jurisdictions: Sao Paulo state, Brazil; Buenos Aires province, Argentina; and Colombia (considered as one unit because of its unitary political system). The study makes use of both the “most similar” and “most different” methods of comparison, allowing González both to provide prima facie support for her theory as well as to reject alternative explanations, including whether each country recently had a dictatorship, the federal or unitary structure of the country, the strength of the military, and the level of ambient societal violence. None of these background factors can explain the variation in outcomes. For example, Buenos Aires (where significant reform ultimately took place) and Sao Paulo (almost no reform) resemble each other on three such factors—recent military rule, strength of military, and federal structure—yet feature differing reform outcomes. In contrast, Buenos Aires and Colombia both differ on all the institutional and social variables (with Colombia actually featuring the highest levels of violence, linked in part to a decades-long guerilla conflict), yet both experienced significant police reform. González traces the common outcome in these “most different” cases to the rise of a robust political opposition that used a major scandal to advocate for reform, thereby intimidating the ruling party into action. The longitudinal component of the research design thus allows González to trace the effects of changes in the political environment within the same case.
González’s study deftly unpacks the ambiguities of policing in a democracy. In principle, the existence of a democratic political order makes possible “democratic coercion” that places human rights at the centre of law enforcement. In practice, the experience of South American democratic states indicates that “authoritarian coercion,” characterized by unconstrained violence against civilians, can be remarkably persistent in a democratic setting. González does not address the related question of whether an authoritarian regime could introduce policies to reduce police-on-civilian violence. Some research (e.g., Wang 2014, Light, Prado et al. 2015) suggests that such parallel causation may occur when authoritarian regimes face incentives to discipline their police (in some cases, precisely in order to make political repression more effective), further complexifying the association between regime types and police practices. However, this point does not detract from the significance of González’s findings within the universe of democratic states. On a more hopeful note, González’s findings suggest that in the long run structural features and historical legacies need not impede police reform. It would be productive to consider how these findings apply elsewhere. For example, varying levels of ambient violence did not influence the reform/non-reform outcomes in the cases González studied. Yet because the whole region displays extremely high levels of violent crime, it may experience a “ceiling effect” in which violence does not vary enough to be significant. Thus, it is not clear whether this finding would be robust in regions with less criminal violence, where variation among cases might be more meaningful. Likewise, scholars of US policing may be surprised that levels of police-on-civilian killings are far greater in many South American countries than in the United States, raising the question of whether the dynamics of reform might be different in countries or regions where the problem is less extreme than in González’s cases. Nonetheless, González’s findings hold an important implication for the United States. Given that her pathway to democratic police reform requires free and fair elections in which socially disadvantaged voters can express their demands for reform effectively, counter-majoritarian institutions and restrictive voting policies in the United States may impede the creation of effective reform coalitions. If so, police reform joins a host of issues, such as abortion and gun control, in which the defects of US democracy systematically thwart the will of majorities of citizens.
In closing, this rigorous study adds significantly to our still-evolving understanding of the complex causal relationship between political regimes and police behaviour. As González finds, that relationship is far from deterministic, and is mediated by a host of complex institutional and situational factors that transcend regime types and regime transitions.