This chapter describes patterns of crime and insecurity in the six study countries where the coordinated randomized trials took place and how these places compare to other countries. It then provides a theoretical framework for understanding the causes of crime, why crime rates often diverge from citizen perceptions of insecurity, and how crime and perceived insecurity can be reduced. The chapter concludes by surveying the set of policy tools used to reduce crime, and how policing fits into those tools.

Evidence-based policing requires not only the production of high-quality research but also the implementation of those research findings as part of a police organization’s work. To date, there has been relatively limited empirical assessment of how to best achieve successful implementation. This chapter presents findings from the process evaluation of the EMUN reform in the Israel Police. The reform institutionalized several evidence-based policing approaches and has been demonstrated as effective in reducing and preventing crime. Our qualitative analysis uncovered three themes associated with a heightened capability to practice evidence-based policing: the ability to analyze data and reflect on it, organizational flexibility, and local engagement with the reform. These themes resonate with the existing literature in the field and are of broad relevance.

Assessing authoritarian police and policing in East Asia poses conceptual challenges – which institutions count as “police,” which functions constitute “policing,” which polities are “authoritarian,” what features are “East Asian”? Patterns can be understood in terms of common issues: functions or roles police are expected to perform; internal institutional structures of the police (including centralization/decentralization); horizontal relations with other institutions; vertical relations with the regime; relations with society; and external influences (from abroad and from the past). Policing is beset by several paradoxes and much ambivalence: scope versus effectiveness of police work; laws and the rule of law as both empowering and constraining police; bolstering legitimacy for the police versus for the regime; “police reform,” which can make police more benign (from a liberal perspective) or more potent tools of oppression and control. The country-specific assessments in this volume collectively reveal a complex pattern that includes fundamental similarities and significant diversity.

This chapter sets up the puzzle of how governments in weak institutionalized democracies regulate criminal markets and achieve relative order. While Latin America is the most violent region in the world, its criminal violence varies according to informal state responses to illicit markets. I collapse these responses into four types of informal regulatory arrangements: particularistic confrontations, particularistic negotiations, coordinated protection rackets and coordinated coexistence. A further intrigue is how elected politicians are able to contain drug-related violence with inefficient police departments prone to corruption and human rights abuses. I unpack the relationships between politicians and police, showing that different regulatory arrangements emerge from various combinations of political competition and police autonomy. This chapter then specifies the study’s research design and scope conditions (i.e., weakly institutionalized democracies) and lays out the plan for the book.

Chapter 2 introduces a two-stage theory of institutional continuity and reform, laying out how societal preferences over the distribution of protection and repression shape politicians’ decisions between the status quo of authoritarian coercion and reform to promote democratic coercion. Far from constituting a failure of democratic processes, politicians’ decisions to either maintain the status quo of authoritarian coercion or undertake police reform both result from ordinary democratic politics. I argue that, even under the constraints posed by the structural power of police, shifts in the convergence of societal preferences over policing and security and a robust political opposition can serve as key drivers of reform by raising the costs to the incumbent of not reforming the police. The theory yields two key predictions. When societal preferences over policing and security are fragmented, politicians have incentives to pursue accommodation with the police, wherein they grant police greater autonomy in exchange for cooperation in the selective distribution of coercion. This favors the persistence of institutional weakness and authoritarian patterns of coercion. On the other hand, incumbents are likely to pursue democratic police reform when societal preferences converge and when they face an electoral threat from a robust political opposition.

Because the cases of Buenos Aires Province and Colombia eventually resulted in ambitious structural police reforms, Chapter 7 presents a detailed sequential analysis of the events that brought about reform in each instance, leveraging changes over time in societal preferences and the strength of the political opposition. The sequential analyses presented in this chapter elucidate the factors that shape politicians’ incentives when choosing between continuity and reform, demonstrating how those incentives changed in response to short-term shifts in societal preferences and political competition. The accounts of Buenos Aires Province and Colombia complement one another well, demonstrating that neither of these conditions is sufficient to bring about reform on its own. In each case, we observe an explicit decision by the executive to maintain the status quo when faced with the convergence of societal preferences (Buenos Aires Province) or a robust political opposition (Colombia) on its own. After both conditions were present, however, the two executives chose to enact comprehensive structural reforms just months after opting for the status quo. By analyzing politicians’ choices before and after the joint occurrence of these conditions, we obtain a greater understanding of the mechanisms underlying institutional persistence and change among police forces.

The concluding chapter explores the often-contradictory relationship between democracy and enduring state violence and the intervening role of inequality. It builds on the book’s key findings to further elucidate the problem that policing poses for democracy, in theory and in practice. The repertoires and distribution of protection and repression in the cases analyzed in this book – and indeed, in many other democracies – are antithetical to what some scholars view as the substantive principles and outcomes of democracy. Yet, these practices are often reinforced by the electoral and participatory processes other scholars have identified as constitutive of democracy. This book’s analysis of three police forces therefore lays bare a tension between procedural and substantive dimensions of democracy. In order to elucidate this tension, the concluding chapter disaggregates democracy and considers how these two dimensions may come to be at odds with one another. The chapter considers how the input of democracy – citizens’ preferences and demands – is channeled through democratic processes such as elections and participatory institutions to produce substantive outcomes that are antithetical to democratic principles. Key to understanding how quintessentially democratic processes result in authoritarian policing practices and structures is the distortions introduced by inequality to each dimension of democracy.