Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice

This article explores one element of community-oriented policing: the need to recruit police officers who will act as agents of change for the community. Using the Rokeach theory of human values, this article reports the findings of a class of police recruits in Mexico City and addresses the prospects for the future success of Mexican community-based police reforms. The value patterns of these recruits suggest that, like their northern counterparts, those who choose to enter the police profession may do so with a consistent conservative set of values that may be anathema to instituting community-oriented policing.

Most Latin American countries have no death penalty, but there is a general acceptance of individuals’ or communities’ right to kill under certain circumstances. This right is not stipulated in any law but it is present in the culture of these societies. To investigate it, a random sample study was carried out in seven Latin American cities. The general results reveal support for the right to kill to defend one’s family, but the right to kill to defend one’s property was lower. Killing someone who has raped a daughter was positive for all the Latin American cities, although killing an individual who attacks the community receives moderate support. The results for “social purge” killings are lower than the previous. The results are analyzed and presented by cities and social variables and show that there is a cultural pattern in which social norms are not always congruent with law.

Donald Black’s “pure sociology,” first set out in his Behavior of Law in 1976, is probably cited more frequently than any other theoretical perspective by researchers studying the use of force by the police. However, his hypotheses have never been systematically tested in relation to this phenomenon. This article reports a partial test of Black’s theory focusing on the role of stratification in explaining police behavior. Officers in one Mexican, one U.S., and three Venezuelan police departments completed a survey in which vignettes were used to elicit dispositions to employ force in encounters with highor low-status citizens who were described in varying confrontational stances. The results did not provide support for Black’s hypotheses concerning stratification and the behavior of law; rather, the key predictor of officers’ disposition to use force was the citizen’s behavior in the encounter. This latter variable merits theoretical attention.

Crime rates in Venezuela increased considerably at the end of the 1970s, and even more so from the mid-1990s onward. Likewise, the country’s major institutions experienced considerable change, moving from constant growth through crisis to a gradual loss of legitimacy. Based on LaFree’s model of institutional legitimacy and crime, the author tests the hypothesis that the declining legitimacy of key institutions was associated with increasing crime rates. Government statistics are used to measure institutional legitimacy and crime rates for the period between 1957 and 2003. Statistical analysis based on auto-regressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) techniques and cross-correlation finds no relationship between the two sets of variables, with the partial exception of robbery. These findings should be considered provisional rather than definitive because alternative variables, additional observations, and alternative statistical techniques might have produced different results. However, alternative explanations of crime rates should also be explored.