Voting with Their Guns: An Integrated Framework of Police Violence

• In Event: Inside the Black Box: Police, Politics, and Communities

Abstract

Most analyses of the intersection of police, politics, and violence center on police’s use of force as an instrument of control and repression, whether of political dissidents or subordinated classes, or on the confrontation between police and organized criminal actors. This is particularly true in Latin America, the region with the highest levels of criminal and state violence per capita in the world. In this paper, I provide a different theoretical approach, focusing on how police administer violence in light of their potential conflicts with political incumbents. While elected officials may seek to restrain or incite police violence, police forces can either comply with or defy these directives. From the combination of these outcomes, I develop a typology of four variants of police administration of violence: peacekeeping, punishing, shirking, and sabotaging. I illustrate this typology with various national and subnational examples from Latin America.

Author

• Hernan Flom, Trinity College