Police misconduct in Chile: What is the role of the institution?

• In Event: WG-PLACE 4: Neighbourhoods, Policing, and Legal Cynicism: Spatial, Institutional, and Life Course Perspectives

Abstract

Traditional approaches to studying police misconduct often overemphasize individual or police culture explanations and do not adopt moral stances, resulting in the neglect of the role of the police as a state actor intertwined with power relations. Critical perspectives do address this role with ethical lenses but lean on theoretical arguments, as they reject the possibility of empirically testing power structures. I bridge these gaps by empirically examining power structures using ideas from complex adaptive systems to deny individual reductionism in the functioning of social systems. At the same time, critical realism underpins my formulation of counterfactual hypotheses with a normative foundation by delimiting how a democratic police should act when facing misconduct of its members. In other words, I propose an empirical, yet morally grounded approach. In order to link structures and individuals I use collective (institutional) action theory to test if the Chilean police were organised against the misconduct of its members. Patterns of misconduct are analysed using a novel database I created using Large Language Models to structure the information of 3,000 criminal complaints. This process is integrated with document analysis from human rights reports by qualitatively creating relevant categories, as well contextualising the institutional role. Overall, when the institution has more control capabilities over police officers, their crimes have more victims, the victims are vulnerable and belong to targeted groups more often, and there is more sexual violence; however, less severe injuries are caused. I theorised the role of the state in supporting police misconduct by arguing that these patterns entail a form of governance that seeks to maximize the role of fear.

Author

• Natalia Cabrera-Morales, University of Cambridge