Defining the Role of the Police in Latin America

Defining the Role of the Police in Latin America

Description

It is difficult to define the role of the police in any society, particularly because the police are so ubiquitous and their job so protean. We can approximate the scope of the police role by speaking of the jobs of protecting persons and keeping order through patrol, as well as investigating past crimes through detectives or “judicial police.” As in so many cases, it is easier to say that the role is not being filled than it is to specify the scope of the role; so, for example, the adoption of a military role for the police seems to me always a mistake. Thus it is clear that in many Latin American countries, the role of the police is misdefined. Many politicians unthinkingly accept a semi-military model in which it is the job of the police to “fight” the enemy “crime,” embodied in the person of the criminal. The model blinds them to the simple perception that the police are citizens, as are those with whom they work, and that there is no enemy. Furthermore, some politicians as well as police administrators have accepted a formula according to which it is the job of the police to reduce crime-to fight it directly, regardless of other institutions of the law and the criminal justice system. This has led to a situation in which the police are ill-equipped either for preventive policing and keeping order or for criminal investigation; they have assimilated everything to a form of semi-military “control” of the sort that Sergio Aguayo mentions in the epigraph quoted above. The consequences can be seen at the extremes in acts of violence such as torture and extrajudicial killings. At the same time, the police have concealed their worst violence, as well as lesser forms of brutality and corruption, by a system of impunity. We can imagine a better role for the police if we do no more than imagine an end to these abuses. When the problems are stated in such a bare, schematic way, it is difficult to understand why democratic societies, now prevailing in most of Latin America, would tolerate such police systems. This is especially so since most of the official violence is directed against the poor, who are the majority in substantially all these countries. Why has the situation continued? We cannot answer that question, or consider what can be done to change the role of the police, unless we confront the fact that, at least as far as life in the cities is concerned, policies that encourage police violence are popular. Leaders have succeeded in conveying the impression that police abuses are directed not to “the people” as a whole, or even to the large part of it that is poor, but only to a few demonized as antisocial. In Sao Paulo in 1991, when former governor Fleury was criticized for strengthening the fearsome ROTA in the military police, he asserted: “The philosophy is what we always try to teach; a police that may be the friend of the worker, the householder and of students, but very hard in relation to bandits. For the bandits there is to be no mercy, no, and the ROTA is going to continue on this path.” And in 1990, when the notorious “tough cop” Luis Patti, an Argentinean police commander, was arrested for torture, residents demonstrated in his support, and even Argentina's President Menem claimed that he had “cleaned up crime,” and that he “does everything well.” From Rio de Janeiro, to Buenos Aires, to Los Angeles, and increasingly to Mexico City, elected officials as well as the police complain that defendants have too many rights, that the courts are a “revolving door,” and that the police have to “crack down” on crime; they even say we need to mount a “war on crime.” I would argue that crime and personal security are always going to pose a political temptation in democratic societies such as these that have large social inequalities. Where there is a free press, the media attracts viewers and readers by sensational crime stories. Politicians can give an impression of strength and decisiveness by inveighing against crime and the criminal justice system without having to come to grips with intractable problems of economic and social injustice; they shift the blame for some of society's ills onto the poor, or at least onto that portion of the poor which can be labeled marginal and dangerous. The appeal is effective because it responds to the fears of the elites and the middle classes, while at the same time it intimidates those who are most affected by police crackdowns. In fact, this method is so effective that politicians sometimes exaggerate the dangers to keep the support of the voters through fear. This has happened recently, for example, in Argentina, where the administration tried to whip up support for increased security measures even though the problem of crime did not seem overwhelming, and it is starting to happen in Mexico. In a case of what Charles Tilly has aptly called the “protection racket,” governments sell their people as a source of support. The rhetoric of fear and personal insecurity is appealing enough in the United States, where the law has assumed such symbolic importance that it seems plausible that the assertion of rights might cause, as well as solve, social problems. The rhetoric is perhaps even more appealing where governments are beleaguered by debt and increased economic misery, and viable political means to alleviate the misery in the short run seem to be closed, sometimes by the demands of creditors. The temptation to escape the apparently insoluble by attacking the criminal justice system becomes overwhelming. Where there has been heavy reliance on the military and security system in the past, moreover, as in Argentina and Brazil, the appeal to that system is reinforced. As the criminologist Zaffaroni has written, penal agencies “try to recover their secure position by projecting another war; because open political violence does not exist any more, there should be a war against ordinary delinquency.” It has reached the point where “human rights” is a term of abuse for some politicians, as though it were a set of privileges for criminals. We cannot rid our societies of police abuses, not even such extreme abuses as torture and extrajudicial killings, merely by showing that they are against the rule of law. The alliance between democracy and the rule of law is uneasy at best. If we think of democracy in its primordial sense of rule by the mass of the people, there is no obvious reason that the demos should care deeply about the generality and continuity of laws. It is familiar ground that one of the reasons democratic governments have constitutions and that the international system has treaty-based and customary laws of “human rights” is that governments, democratic as well as authoritarian, often see little reason to protect those who are outcasts. I think we have to go beyond the assertion of human rights to show why, as a practical matter, changing the police by subjecting them to the rule of law is in the interest of all groups, elite as well as poor, in a democratic society. The main goal of this chapter is to make that apparent. But before we reach that point, we have to understand the scope of the extremes in police work.

Source Publication

The (Un)Rule of Law and the Underprivileged in Latin America

Source Editors/Authors

Juan E. Méndez, Guillermo O'Donnell, Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro

Publication Date

1999

Defining the Role of the Police in Latin America

Find @ NYU

Share

COinS