The role of exercising the state's coercive authority makes the police both an instrument of power and a formidable political actor whose cooperation is needed by politicians.

Despite historic increases in crime and violence, Latin America’s police forces are characterized by long periods of institutional weakness punctuated by rare, sweeping reforms. To understand these patterns of institutional continuity and change, the author applies the concept of structural power, demonstrating how police leverage their control of coercion to constrain the policy options available to politicians. Within this constrained policy space, politicians choosing between continuity and reform assess societal preferences for police reform and patterns of political competition. Under fragmented societal preferences, irrespective of political competition, reform brings little electoral gain and risks alienating a powerful bureaucracy. Preference fragmentation thus favors the persistence of institutional weakness. When societal preferences converge and a robust political opposition threatens incumbents, politicians face an electoral counterweight to the structural power of police, making reform likely. Using evidence from periods of continuity and reform in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia, the author traces both outcomes to shifts in societal preferences and political opposition. Despite the imperative to address citizens’ demands by building state capacity in security provision, these cases show that police reform is often rendered electorally disadvantageous.

The institutionalization of community participation in the context of policing has become increasingly common in Latin America as a means of addressing the seemingly intractable increase in crime and insecurity. The creation of formal spaces for community participation in security differs markedly from how police forces have historically operated. Moreover, opening spaces for citizen input and oversight could potentially limit an executive’s control over the police, an important political tool. Why, then, do politicians sometimes turn to “participatory security” when reforming the police? This article argues that politicians choose participation as a safety valve to disaggregate societal discontent, particularly when police-society relations are fractious and police capacity and resources are low. Drawing on qualitative evidence from Buenos Aires Province, São Paulo State, and Colombia, this study demonstrates that participation can serve a range of strategic purposes, which, in turn, shape the institutional design of the participatory mechanism.

Police exercise the state’s monopoly of legitimate use of force, a fundamental state function that shapes the construction of citizenship. What are the implications for citizenship when that monopoly is profoundly contested and unevenly distributed? This article explores this question in Latin America, where police confront historically high rates of crime and violence in the context of uneven state capacity and pervasive social inequality. Throughout Latin America, citizens lack the security necessary to engage in everyday political, economic, and social activities that are constitutive of citizenship, resulting in constrained citizenship. At the same time, citizens’ everyday interactions and relationships to police reproduce existing social inequalities along lines of race, class, and geography, resulting in stratified citizenship. These policing practices and the concomitant constraints on and stratification of citizenship are mutually reinforcing, with troubling implications for state formation and democracy in the world’s most violent and most unequal region.

The language of community and societal participation in the context of crime prevention has become ubiquitous throughout Latin America, as governments increasingly turn to police–community partnerships as a means of addressing the seemingly intractable problems of rising crime and insecurity. But to what extent has such “participatory security” had any influence on the capacity of the state to provide security? I argue that in order to understand whether and how these participatory instruments shape what police actually do, we must look to variation in institutional design and how community participation operates in practice. I develop a typology of participatory security that considers how different institutional features may differentially affect police and other state agencies by alternatively serving as channels for the flow of information and oversight mechanisms or simply as a tool for improving the police's image. Drawing on evidence from participatory security institutions in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia, I illustrate the impact of institutional design on police and state capacity to provide security. I conclude by considering the unintended consequences of institutional design, including the degree of police resistance that different institutional models will generate. This opposition, may, in turn, affect the durability of the participatory institution.