Review: Democratic Policing and Accountability: Global Perspectives
| Author | Willem de Lint |
| Published date | 01 April 2001 |
| Date | 01 April 2001 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/000486580103400107 |
| Subject Matter | Reviews |
lR
EV
lEW
S
Democratic Policing and Accountability:
Global Perspectives
Ed.
By
Errol Mendes,Joaquin Zuckerberg, Susan Lecorre,Anne Gabriel,and Jeffrey
Clark.(I999)
Publisher:Ashgate:Aldershot,
England
241
pages
It is becoming increasingly evident to most
North
American
and
British policing
experts
that
there are many models of policing which do
not
even pretend to cater
to
the
Peelian ideal. But it is also fast becoming a live question whether policing
systems, as Bruce
Smith
once
called
them,
can
be quickly differentiated
on
a
number of key dimensions and, more importantly, placed
on
a more or less unitary
trajectory
between
top
...
down
military
and
bottom
...
up
democratic
forms.
The
question of
the
relationship between democracy, fascism
and
the
police is thus
always close at hand, and is examined a new volume by Mendes et al. -
Democratic
Policing
and
Accountability:
Global
Perspectives.
The
book is a welcome contribution
to a body of interdisciplinary scholarship
that
brings policing back into nexus with
international relations, peace and conflict studies, political science,
and
the
sociol
...
ogy of law, to name just some of
the
cross
...
fertilisations.
The
first chapter by Errol Mendes takes up
the
question of
the
tight relationship
between policing
and
politics. After recounting police abuses in
China,
central
America, Indonesia,
and
South
America, Mendes alerts us to
the
importance of
macro social
capital-
capital
that
the
World Bank has recognised to be an imped
...
iment to development (tell
that
to
the
IMF!). He argues further
that
policing is
not
only determined by state politics and its corruption; rather, police may be change
agents. Mendes suggests
that
this may happen through 'humble' dialogues between
reformers of a country's police infrastructure, outside practitioners, and policy and
academic input.
This is an intriguing question - is police reform essentially amatter of applying
the
correct strategy? Is it the case
that
democratic and liberal police may compel
movement towards more democratic
and
liberal states?
Or
do
the
police follow
once political
and
economic reforms have forced
the
issue? Similarly, is income
disparity reduction, as suggested by Mendes, a
quantity
that
can
be pushed by
police reform or is it rather disparity reduction
that
will push police reform?
When
we understand many liberal democratic states to have been stripped down to their
Hobbesian core, it is a nice irony
that
it is police
that
are called upon to perform
the
work of welfare distribution.
One
wonders how far one
can
go with
the
atten-
dant
idea of governing through
the
police. In
the
United
States, there seems
at
present to be no end in sight to this innovation.
The
chapter
by Andrew Goldsmith is a manual
on
civilian oversight.
After
laying
out
the
various ways in which it is essential for everything from police effec
...
tiveness to police integrity, it suggests such a civilian oversight may be established
to
meet
the
necessary
criteria
of
independence
while
providing
assurances.
THE AUSTRALIAN
AND
NEW
ZEALAND
JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
VOLUME
34
NUMBER
12001
PP.
105-109
105
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