![handle is hein.journals/pgsty22 and id is 1 raw text is: Policing & Society ] Routled ge
Vol. 22, No. 1, March 2012, 1-13 9 Tayor&Frand Group
INTRODUCTION
Reassessing community-oriented policing in Latin America
Mark Ungara* and Enrique Desmond Ariash
'Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA;
bJohn Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center, City University of New York,
New York, NY, USA
In every part of Latin America, unprecedented levels of violence have even led to
questions about the underlying quality of democratic rule. In response to this crisis,
governments have enacted an array of policies, ranging from repressive mano dura
crackdowns and adoption of new technology to the reform of criminal justice
systems. But one of the most popular approaches to reform efforts has been
community-oriented policing (COP), a strategy popularised in the USA in the 1990s,
which is based on close collaboration between the police and the neighbourhood
residents. COP focuses on the causes of crime - rather than simply responsding to it -
by empowering citizens, building police-community partnerships, improving social
services and using better crime statistics. Street patrols, policy councils and youth
services are some of the many COP programmes being adopted in Latin America
and other regions. As other authors emphasise, this reform also entails restructuring
of police forces to make them more flexible and responsive. Skogan and Hartnett
(1997), for example, stress decentralisation of authority and foot patrols to facilitate
citizen-police communications and public participation in setting police priorities
and developing tactics.
The results of these efforts, however, have been very uneven. Some programmes
have shown considerable success while others have faced many difficulties and either
been defunded or left to expire of their own accord. Why do some projects succeed
where others fail? More importantly, what can Latin American policy-makers learn
from past experiences in the region in order to develop more effective and successful
policies for the future?
This edition of Policing and Society takes a step towards answering these
questions by bringing together security officials, practitioners and scholars to offer
detailed analyses of community reform efforts at the local, regional and national
levels throughout Latin America. The articles cover programmes in Colombia, Chile,
Venezuela, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Argentina, Mexico and Brazil. By
detailing the challenges facing reform and how to overcome them, these cases
provide an important compendium about community policing in Latin America that
will help practitioners and policy-makers build effective durable programmes. This
introduction highlights critical issues that the individual articles develop further.
Those challenges, as contributors discuss, fall along two main dimensions: support
*Corresponding author. Email: MUngar@brooklyn.cuny.edu
ISSN 1043-9463 print/ISSN 1477-2728 online
© 2011 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2011.597856
http://www.tandfonline.com](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/pgsty22&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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