The not-so-hidden partisan politics of community policing: Community police meetings in Buenos Aires, Argentina
| Author | Leslie Elva MacColman,Violeta Dikenstein |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806221103848 |
| Published date | 01 May 2023 |
| Date | 01 May 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The not-so-hidden partisan
politics of community policing:
Community police meetings in
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Leslie Elva MacColman
The Ohio State University, USA
Violeta Dikenstein
Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina
Abstract
Community policing promises to foster collaboration between police and citizens,
strengthen social cohesion, and address the root causes of crime and disorder. In
order to understand why it often fails to achieve this, we argue that scholars should rec-
ognize community–police meetings as sites of dynamic, multi-scalar political contest-
ation and pay closer attention to the not-so-hidden partisan struggles that shape
them. Our empirical analysis focuses on Buenos Aires, Argentina. Based on ethno-
graphic observation of 30 community–police meetings and interviews with 50 politi-
cians, police officers, activists, and everyday citizens, we explain how higher-order
partisan contests influenced the dynamics and outcomes of local meetings. We show
how these meetings exacerbated social schisms, reified ideological differences between
competing parties, and galvanized support for the City Government’s“law and order”
policies. Our results suggest that local participation sometimes reinforces the punitive
approaches to urban problems that community policing originally aimed to transcend.
Keywords
community policing, ethnography, interviews, politics, punitiveness, urban space
Corresponding author:
Leslie Elva MacColman, The Ohio State University,1885 Neil Avenue Mall, Columbus, Ohio 43210-1132, USA.
Email: leslie.elva@gmail.com
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2023, Vol. 27(2) 326–347
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13624806221103848
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcr
Introduction
On a rainy Thursday evening, in September 2018, around 30 people sat in folding chairs
in the back room of a police station in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The assistant Precinct
Chief was using a Power Point to describe local police operations in the preceding
month. As he explained, the Chief had assigned more officers to the “safe schools corri-
dor”and overseen a drug raid in the nearby slum, Barrio 8. His 15-minute presentation
stretched to 30 minutes and, by the end, participants were eager to engage in a full-blown
discussion.
When the lights came on, a retired school teacher, whom the police officer called Elise,
immediately posed a question: “Speaking of Barrio 8, when the City Government finishes
that new building are they going to demolish the shacks?”The Assistant Precinct Chief
deferred to the President of the Communal Council, next to him on the stage. The
Councilman responded:
The City Government is trying to finish that project quickly. Once the first building is done, half
of the people [from the slum] can move into it. Then, they’ll demolish the shacks so that they can
finish the second building where the other half will live.
Elise rolled her eyes. “Who, exactly, is going to move into that building? Are they
honest workers or drug dealers?”She meandered through several complaints about
loud music, told a story about a street protest she once organized, and closed by
saying that the crime in her neighborhood had increased owing to the social welfare pol-
icies of Argentina’s former President. “It hurts me to see money going into the urbaniza-
tion of slums when there’s no money for the public hospital”, said Elise.
I’ve said that to Larreta [the Buenos Aires Mayor] …I know him and Macri [the President of
Argentina]. You know what else I told him? “Crime is out of control here, but it doesn’t have to
be like this. In other countries, if someone spits on a police officer, they go to jail.”I’m sick and
tired of living like this. And I’m sick and tired of hearing about human rights.
This description comes from a community–police meeting in a mixed-income neigh-
borhood of Buenos Aires, Argentina. This particular exchange, like others that occurred
that evening, had a visibly partisan tenor. Each of the people mentioned came to this
meeting with a political agenda. As independent researchers, we knew this because we
had interviewed several of them in private. Other people in the room knew it, too,
based on the formal positions they held, their personal networks, what they said, and
what they failed to say. The exchange between Elise, the Council President, and the
Assistant Precinct Chief was one of hundreds like it that we observed in the context of
Buenos Aires’newest community policing program.
In this article, we unpack the dynamics of community–police meetings in Buenos
Aires in order to shed light on the not-so-hidden partisan politics of community policing.
Prior research on community policing, though abundant, has often overlooked the influ-
ence of partisan politics, assuming that encounters like these are self-contained conversa-
tions between relatively cohesive urban “communities”and non-partisan public officials.
MacColman and Dikenstein 327
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