“What citizens can see of the state”: Police and the construction of democratic citizenship in Latin America
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480617724826 |
| Author | Yanilda María González |
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480617724826
Theoretical Criminology
2017, Vol. 21(4) 494 –511
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480617724826
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“What citizens can see of
the state”: Police and the
construction of democratic
citizenship in Latin America
Yanilda María González
University of Chicago, USA
Abstract
Police exercise the state’s monopoly of legitimate use of force, a fundamental state function
that shapes the construction of citizenship. What are the implications for citizenship when
that monopoly is profoundly contested and unevenly distributed? This article explores
this question in Latin America, where police confront historically high rates of crime
and violence in the context of uneven state capacity and pervasive social inequality.
Throughout Latin America, citizens lack the security necessary to engage in everyday
political, economic, and social activities that are constitutive of citizenship, resulting in
constrained citizenship. At the same time, citizens’ everyday interactions and relationships
to police reproduce existing social inequalities along lines of race, class, and geography,
resulting in stratified citizenship. These policing practices and the concomitant constraints
on and stratification of citizenship are mutually reinforcing, with troubling implications
for state formation and democracy in the world’s most violent and most unequal region.
Keywords
Citizenship, democracy, inequality, Latin America, police, state
Latin American police officials recognize their central role within states facing rampant
violence and uneven “infrastructural power” (Mann, 1984) that pose urgent challenges
for governance and order. The police, as the former commander of Colombia’s National
Corresponding author:
Yanilda González, Assistant Professor, School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago, 969 E
60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.
Email: yanilda@uchicago.edu
724826TCR0010.1177/1362480617724826Theoretical CriminologyGonzález
research-article2017
Article
González 495
Police put it, are “the materialization of the state, what [citizens] can see of the state”.1 A
São Paulo police official similarly affirmed that, “in Brazil, the only visible face of the
state is the police”.2 In low-capacity settings, police are often the only state entity avail-
able to citizens, substituting for absent state or social institutions. Throughout Latin
America, as Bittner (1990: 19) observed of US police, the police are “the most easily
accessible organ of government and the most conspicuous presence of the state’s power
for both good and bad”.
This article probes how police, a key “local manifestation of the state” (Soifer, 2008),
shape citizenship in Latin America’s “violent democracies” (Arias and Goldstein, 2010).
Police exercise the state’s monopoly of legitimate use of force, a fundamental function
that structures the construction of citizenship. What are the implications for citizenship
when that monopoly is profoundly contested and unevenly distributed? Such questions
are crucial in Latin America, where a democratic period marked by rampant crime and
violence has laid bare the precariousness of state institutions. From organized criminal
groups and transnational drug trafficking to spikes in street crime and homicides, it is a
phenomenon from which few, if any, countries have been immune. The formation of
democratic citizenship is inextricably linked to these patterns of violence and the state’s
security policies and apparatus.
The discussion that follows develops a framework for understanding how the police’s
exercise of the state’s coercive authority shapes how individuals experience citizenship.
I look specifically to two dimensions of state action: the level of security provision, and
the distribution of security among the citizenry. Deficient security provision produces
constrained citizenship, while unequal provision yields stratified citizenship. As many
Latin American democracies proved increasingly incapable of enforcing the law, citizens
faced the proliferation of “brown areas” (O’Donnell, 1993), territories in which they lack
the security necessary to engage in everyday political, economic, and social activities
that are constitutive of citizenship. The result is constrained citizenship, characterized by
impediments to the practice of the civil, social, and political dimensions of citizenship
due to alienation from other citizens and state institutions.
Moreover, as the world’s “most unequal” region,3 characteristics such as race, class,
and geography have long determined citizens’ access to state services and basic rights.
Thus, policing, too, may be shaped by existing societal hierarchies and power structures.
I argue that, insofar as policing strategies are determined by markers of inequality such
as race, class, and geography, policing promotes divergent access to rights and relation-
ships to state institutions, resulting in stratified citizenship.
But policing does not simply reproduce inequality. Policing may generate a negative
feedback loop that fundamentally structures the practical manifestation of democratic
citizenship. Citizenship becomes effectively constrained by deficient protection, while
stratification limits the power and ability of marginalized citizens to articulate demands
for protection—including protection from state repression—thereby further constraining
citizenship for marginalized communities. In contexts like Latin America, defined by
uneven state capacity, extraordinary violence and pervasive inequality, how police exer-
cise the state’s coercive authority may set forth mutually reinforcing processes that
meaningfully undermine citizenship. I illustrate the theoretical framework with evidence
from interviews and ethnographic work carried out between 2010 and 2013 for a broader
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