This edited volume explores the nature of authoritarian policing, its transformation and resilience, and its rule of law implications. The discussion of the evolution of policing takes place in the context of the overall development of the police, their professionalization, institutional autonomy and neutrality, legality, and their credibility within the communities they manage and serve. What makes policing “democratic” is a contested concept and the definition varies depending on the level of abstraction and the particular focus of the inquiry. While regime type, which is itself a contested concept, the close nexus between the coercive power of the police and the state, it is never dispositive. Thus, the dichotomous categorization of authoritarian policing (AP) and democratic policing (DP), while useful as a starting point for comparative analysis, misses a large amount of nuance and often overlooks the plurality of either system, neglecting the fact that a police system can be authoritarian or democratic in multiple ways and in different aspects of policing. This volume rejects this simple binary view. It aims to untie and unpack the nexus between the police and the political system and to explore the plurality of both AP and DP.

This chapter summarizes the book’s findings and discusses extensions of the argument. I outline the within-case and cross-case comparisons apparent in the four metropolitan areas covered in the previous chapters. I then briefly analyze to what extent the argument can apply to the regulation of drug markets in other Latin American metropolitan areas. I end the book with a series of theoretical and policy implications as well as potential research questions on the relationship between the state and illicit markets.

This chapter deploys the book’s theoretical framework, which connects political competition, police autonomy and informal regulation of illicit markets. While the electoral costs of police corruption and violence can motivate politicians to reduce police autonomy, political fragmentation and turnover condition whether and how they can achieve this objective. Fragmentation may obstruct policy implementation but also inhibit politicians from centralizing police rent extraction, while turnover impedes sustaining policies that reduce police autonomy over time. Police autonomy will shape how the police regulate drug markets. With greater autonomy police broker particularistic negotiations with, or engage in unbridled violence, or particularistic confrontation, against dealers and traffickers. When politicians reduce police autonomy through politicization, they capture rents from criminal activities and produce coordinated protection rackets, defined by high corruption but also lower violence on both sides. Finally, professionalized police forces regulate drug trafficking through coordinated coexistence regimes, brokering informal agreements that limit violence by both police and criminals.

This concluding chapter first briefly summarizes the argument to explain variation in the processes and mechanisms that lead victims to pursue distinct strategies of resistance to criminal extortion. It then identifies the broader implications that follow from the book’s core findings, including the need to bring victims more squarely into our research on the politics of crime, unpack how victims understand and experience criminal victimization, broaden our approach to the political consequences of criminal victimization to include resistance, and complicate the ways in which we think about relations between police and communities. The chapter outlines a future research agenda on the politics of crime that emphasizes greater attention to the intersection between the political economy of development and the politics of crime as well as criminal governance, armed politics, and the ways in which attention to the understandings of victims can help move us beyond a focus on relations between states and criminals as limited to the binary of corruption or conflict. The final part of the chapter discusses a series of policy implications based on the book’s analysis and findings.