Fighting for a democratic police: National policing fields and the differential incorporation of public management and community policing in Argentina and Chile

In this paper I discuss how the Chilean Carabineros and the Argentine Federal Police differently incorporated public management and community policing models in the recent neoliberal and democratic period. Questioning the approaches that see changes in police bureaucracies as bureaucratic adaptations to high crime societies (Garland), as the passive adoptions of neoliberal political rationalities and managerial techniques (O’Malley), or as almost natural tendencies after democratic transitions, I propose a field-theory approach to explain the emergence and differential consolidation of new these two policing models in two national police bureaucracies in similar socio-political contexts. Locating those police bureaucracies within national policing fields—spaces of struggle over policing policies and priorities that involve the police forces, authorities, experts and civil society organizations—I explain the successful incorporation of public management and community policing models in Chile and the initial superficial incorporation and later reversal and final abandonment of these models in Argentina. 

With this approach I explain why, paradoxically, in Chile, where the central government had almost no control over the police in the democratic period the police changed—adopted these models—, whereas in Argentina, where the central government controlled the police from the beginning of the democratic period police reform failed. I argue that the greater bureaucratic autonomy of the Chilean police lead to a self-transformation of the police in which the police incorporated the new models to legitimate itself and retain its bureaucratic autonomy. In the more heteronomous Argentine police, authorities introduced the new models into the police, but later on halt the reform, and revert to harsh policing strategies in line with their penal-populist orientations. The field-theory analysis, focusing on variations in bureaucratic autonomy and on the (sometimes perverse) effects of political interests, shows we need to rethink the link between democratic influences and institutional police change.