There’s a great deal of support for community policing, but not a lot of concrete data on whether it works. What makes this a challenging issue to study?

Christia: Building trust between police and the citizens they are tasked to protect is at the core of community policing. As such, an important challenge lies with identifying the right measures to capture this often-complex police-citizen interaction. This was even more of a pronounced challenge in our study as we conducted six coordinated experiments across a diverse set of sites in the Global South in Brazil, Colombia, Liberia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Uganda.

To make progress in understanding the impacts of community policing, we needed to develop a set of common strategies for the police to implement that made sense in each national context, which we call locally appropriate community policing interventions. We also needed to agree upon a shared research design across countries and to introduce common outcome measures to ensure that we were looking at the impacts of these programs in similar ways. This approach to launching coordinated, multi-site, randomized controlled trials across contexts has been pioneered by the organization that sponsored this work, Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP).

Your team partnered with six communities across the Global South in Brazil, Colombia, Liberia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Uganda. Based on your research, what evidence did you find for or against the use of community policing practices?

Blair: We find that community policing doesn’t live up to its promise when implemented in the Global South. Community policing doesn’t build trust between citizens and police, it doesn’t lead to citizens to share the kinds of tips and information with police that might improve police efficiency, and, perhaps not surprisingly then, it does not lead to lower crime. This disappointing result was apparent across all six contexts and for all of the primary outcomes we measured.

Is there an alternative to community policing, or ways to reform these systems, that would make them more efficacious at creating the desired outcomes?

Weinstein: We carefully examined each of the six contexts, including through interviews with the police agencies and the research teams, to make sense of this null result. We identified three primary constraints that may have impeded the implementation of community policing: (a) a lack of prioritization of these new practices by police leadership (b) the rotation to new posts of police officers who had championed the effort and were trained to implement it and (c) limited resources to follow up on the concerns raised by citizens.

The bottom line is that community policing isn’t positioned to deliver increased trust and collaboration in environments with limited incentives and resources to enable police to change their behavior. Our conclusion is that community policing should be seen as an incremental reform that can make a difference in well-resourced police departments with strong incentives to be responsive to citizen concerns. But when those conditions are absent, an incremental approach can’t deliver. More systemic reforms are required.

How does the data from your work fit into broader issues of equity, just representation, and racism that communities across the world continue to grapple with?

Blair: In many ways community policing appears to be the ideal policy for this moment, where so many are demanding that police abuse be reduced while also reducing crime victimization. Community policing is meant to do both, constructing a virtuous cycle between citizen-police cooperation, trust, and crime reduction. Our null results sound a note of caution: it may not be so simple. We observed big barriers to implementing this shift in policing, and barriers that likely affect other incremental policies. To address equity in the way governments enforce the law, we may need more systematic changes to how we organize the police and hold them accountable.   

Scholars, law enforcement officials, business leaders and community activists will meet next week at Stanford to examine violence and policing in Latin American and the United States.

A two-day conference beginning April 28 will highlight the work of entrepreneurs and grassroots organizations trying to reduce violence and rebuild civil society. The gathering is hosted by the Program on Poverty and Governance (PovGov) at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. It is hosted in partnership with the Bill Lane Center for the American West, the Center for Latin American Studies, the ‘Mexico Initiative’ at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

"Violence linked to drug trafficking, gang wars and criminality is one of the leading barriers to development that effects the lives of millions in Latin America,” said Beatriz Magaloni, an associate professor of political science who directs PovGov, a program that studies the links between public action, goverance and poverty.

“The conference brings together people who have dealt with these problems in cities in Latin America and in the U.S. Seldom is the case that we bring to campus practitioners with first-hand experience dealing with some of the most pressing problems the hemisphere is confronting,” said Magaloni, who is also a senior fellow at FSI. 

The first day of the conference will feature a panel with Jose Galicot, the driving force of Tijuana Innovadora, a movement that helped Tijuana recover from devastating criminal activity and violence the last four years. Galicot will be joined by Jailson Silva, from Observatório of Favelas, one of the most reputable grass-roots organizations in the slums of Rio that undertakes research, consultancy and public actions focused on the city's favelas.

Many violence-plagued cities in the U.S. have implemented innovative initiatives to address the challenge that have included community policing tools and youth violence interventions. Similar initiatives are also taking place in Latin America with varying degrees of success. One of the goals of the conference is to get practitioners to share their experiences and best practices to reduce violence in major cities.

One of three featured keynote speakers, Sergio Fajardo, the current governor of Antioquia, Colombia, will speak on April 29 and help build the foundation for such dialogue. From 2003 to 2007, Fajardo implemented an effective strategy to reduce the level of violence in Medellin while he was mayor of the Colombian city.

By providing alternatives to illicit work, allocating resources to the most disadvantage areas, reclaiming public spaces and fostering dialogue among different sectors of society to create a sense of collective ownership, Fajardo transformed Medellin.

The two other keynotes include Mariano Beltrame, minister of security of Rio de Janeiro who is credited for the enactment and implementation of the Pacification Police Unites to reduce violence in the favelas of the city and Hector Robles, major of the municipality of Zapopan who has implemented various innovative policies to give better opportunities to the youth in Mexico, including an initiative called Jovenes con Porvenir (Youth with a Bright Future). 

The conference will also bring together police chiefs from Brazil and the U.S. to share their experiences and insights on grassroots implementation of initiatives designed to reduce violence. General Commander of Operations, Coronel Paulo Henrique, from the military police of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Chief Eric Jones from Stockton, CA will be speaking on a panel titled, “’Pacification’ Strategies and Policing” on day two of the conference. Tony Farrar, chief of police for the city of Rialto, CA will be joined by Robert Chapman, deputy director of Community Policing Advancement and others to present on police accountability and gang violence in the U.S shortly thereafter.  

The conference will build upon a PovGov research project that is focused on the Brazilian military police in Rio de Janeiro. Targeting an important initiative in the city's favelas, the "Pacifying Police Units", the ongoing project investigates the use of lethal force by the police and reforms aimed at controlling violence.

A number of conference sessions will be led by CDDRL faculty members and affiliates, including: FSI Director Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar; Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow; FSI senior fellow and CDDRL affiliated faculty member Alberto Díaz-Cayeros; and former President of Peru and CDDRL Visiting Lecturer Alejandro Toledo. A conference report will be made available following the event.

Sessions will be held at Stanford University's Bechtel Conference room in Encina Hall on Monday, April 28 and the Alumni Center on Tuesday, April 29.  All sessions are free and open to the public. Please RSVP here to attend. A complete agenda can be found here.

For conference updates via Twitter please visit #PovGov

Access to life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical treatments is a nagging problem for millions of Latin Americans. In several countries of the region, judicial actions for the protection of basic rights have proved to be instrumental for gaining access to such goods. Brazil and Colombia are, allegedly, the two Latin American countries with the largest number of right to health cases. Everaldo Lamprea suggests that dismantling right to health litigation in order to reduce public costs--as was recently proposed by the Colombian government-- would be a catastrophic event for many Colombians, trapped in a heavily privatized and deregulated health system where many life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical treatments are out of the reach of most pockets. Lamprea will suggest that a more reasonable governmental reaction should include an analysis of the role played in the current health-sector crisis by global actors such as International Financial Institutions and BigPharma companies

Why have militarized crackdowns on drug cartels had wildly divergent outcomes, sometimes exacerbating cartel-state conflict, as in Mexico and, for decades, in Brazil, but sometimes reducing violence, as with Rio de Janeiro's new 'Pacification' (UPP) strategy?  CDDRL-CISAC Post Doctoral Fellow Benjamin Lessing will distinguish key logics of violence, focusing on violent corruption--cartels' use of coercive force in the negotiation of bribes. Through this channel, crackdowns can lead to increased fighting unless the intensity of state repression is made conditional on cartels' use of violence--a key difference between Mexico and Brazil.