When Gun Violence Outrage Isn’t Enough to Bring Reform

When she started her work, the overall understanding was that South American nations had not reformed their police forces throughout their transitions to democracy as a result of there was a lot else that wanted to be performed. In that model of the story, fixing the police simply hadn’t been a precedence.

However when she dug slightly deeper, she discovered that there really was quite a lot of public demand for higher safety and crime management, and sometimes quite a lot of anger in communities affected by police violence. The police hadn’t been ignored: They’d been protected.

The police had been politically highly effective as a result of they may selectively withdraw their companies, permitting crime and dysfunction to rise, scary anger at elected officers. In addition they tended to be properly related, in a position to foyer successfully to guard their very own pursuits. That meant battle with the police was expensive for politicians, who tended to keep away from it, leaving police departments and practices largely unaltered.

However there was a selected, tough to attain set of situations that, if met, would result in police reform, Gonzalez discovered. Briefly summarized, her system was this: scandal + public unity + credible political opposition = reform.

The sequence began with a scandal or disaster that led public opinion to unite a majority of individuals in favor of reform, she wrote in her ebook “Authoritarian Police in Democracy.” If there was additionally an actual electoral menace from political opponents calling for reform, that might be sufficient to steer leaders to behave to be able to stave off their competitors.

In Argentina and Colombia, that sequence led to main reforms after high-profile police killings.

But when even a kind of components was lacking, the established order continued. In Brazil, the Carandiru bloodbath was definitely a scandal, and there was a reasonably strong political opposition that joined within the criticism, to some extent. However public opinion about it was fragmented: citing polls on the time, Gonzalez discovered that a couple of third of Brazilians authorised of the best way that the police had dealt with the state of affairs. The second factor of the sequence, convergence of public opinion, was lacking. The consequence: no reform.