In countries around the world, from the United States to the Philippines to Chile, police forces are at the center of social unrest and debates about democracy and rule of law. This book examines the persistence of authoritarian policing in Latin America to explain why police violence and malfeasance remain pervasive decades after democratization. It also examines the conditions under which reform can occur. Drawing on rich comparative analysis and evidence from Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia, the book opens up the 'black box' of police bureaucracies to show how police forces exert power and cultivate relationships with politicians, as well as how social inequality impedes change. González shows that authoritarian policing persists not in spite of democracy but in part because of democratic processes and public demand. When societal preferences over the distribution of security and coercion are fragmented along existing social cleavages, politicians possess few incentives to enact reform.

Everyone is for "democratic policing"; everyone is against a "police state." But what do those terms mean, and what should they mean? The first half of this book traces the connections between the changing conceptions of American democracy over the past half-century and the roughly contemporaneous shifts in ideas about the police--linking, on the one hand, the downfall of democratic pluralism and the growing popularity of participatory and deliberative democracy with, on the other hand, the shift away from the post-war model of professional law enforcement and the movement toward a new orthodoxy of community policing. The second half of the book explores how a richer set of ideas about policing might change our thinking about a range of problems and controversies associated with the police, ranging from racial profiling and the proliferation of private security, to affirmative action and the internal governance of law enforcement agencies.

This book contains 15 articles concerning the relationships between police, security, and democracy. The book features data on the social, official, public, and private reaction to crime as it is related to the first link in the criminal justice system, the police. It also explores the relationships between police reactions to crime within the context of "democracy" as dynamic, ongoing political arrangements, processes and as a value system. The book is divided into five sections: (1) articles centered upon the theory of the relationships between police and democracy; (2) community policing as the supposed apex of democratic policing; (3) police and policing in stable democracies; (4) police and policing in societies that are in transition from repressive regimes towards democratic political systems and/or free market economies; and (5) special issues which democratic police and policing must consider either because of technical or social developments or because they are inherent in the processes and essence of police and security forces exercising their mandates. Notes, figures, tables, references, appendix, index.

Numerous allegations of abuse of power have been made against the domestic security intelligence agencies in the United Kingdom such as police special branches and MI5. These include the improper surveillance of trade unionists and peace activists, campaigns of mis-information against elected politicians and even the elimination' of people believed to be engaged in political violence. Drawing on extensive foreign material and making use of the social science concepts of information, power and law, this book develops a framework for the comparative analysis of these agencies.

The promotion of security is no longer a state monopoly. It is dispersed and takes place through the practices of states, corporations, non-governmental actors and community-based organizations. But what do we know about the ways in which 'security' is thought about and promoted in this pluralized field of delivery? Are democratic values being advanced and protected, or threatened and compromised? Wood and Dupont bring together a team of renowned scholars to shed light on our understanding of the arrangements for contemporary security governance. Offering a 'friendly dialogue' between those who argue that democratic transformation rests in the development of strong state institutions and those who propose a more de-centered agenda, the scholars in this volume bring cutting-edge theoretical analyses to bear on empirical examples. This volume will appeal to researchers in the fields of criminology, political science, sociology and security studies.

Every day the media floods the airwaves with their often-contradictory version of the role and behavior of the police force. Based on this, you might think that police officers either brutally enforce their own interpretation of the nation‘s laws or use all the modern tools available to carefully and persistently uncover the special clues that lead

Offers timely discussion by attorneys, government officials, policy analysts, and academics from the United States and Latin America of the responses of the state, civil society, and the international community to threats of violence and crime.