Review: Democratic Policing and Accountability: Global Perspectives

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 capitalcapital 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 a matter 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 attendant 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.