Padding the Iron Fist: How Community Policing Legitimizes Mano Dura Logic

• In Event: Padding the Iron Fist? Ethnographic Approaches to Ongoing Criminal Justice and Citizen Security Reforms in Latin America

Abstract

Community policing has become a key aspect of citizen security reform across Latin America, offering a new logic of security that promotes prevention over reaction and citizen participation over citizen repression. By envisioning citizens as collaborators rather than enemy combatants, the model of community policing is often championed as a corrective to the repressive logic of mano dura policing. Based on two years of ethnographic work on police reform in Caracas, Venezuela, I argue that, rather than replacing mano dura approaches to security, community policing has been adapted as a complement to those approaches. The combination of extremely high rates of violence and the unique socialist rhetoric of the Chavista governments justifies the use of excessive—even extralegal—force with those who refuse to give up the “malandro” life. In this context, the implementation of a “humanist” approach to security, highly supportive of community policing, has promoted a bifurcated logic that envisions preventative policing bodies as complemented by security forces capable of “exterminating” violent threats to society. Community policing has been adopted and is supported by officers and citizens, but only as a complement to repressive policing. Thus, the way in which community policing has been translated in this context operates to bolster support for militarized and extra-legal responses to crime.

Author

• Rebecca A Hanson, University of Georgia/Athens