Toward Democratic Policing: Rethinking Strategies of Transformation

• NCJ Number: 169425
• Author(s): C Shearing
• Date Published: 1997
• Length: 10 pages
• Sponsoring Agency: National Institute of Justice (NIJ); US Dept of Justice NIJ Pub; US Dept of State
• Sale Source: National Institute of Justice/NCJRS; NCJRS Photocopy Services
• Publication Type: Conference Material
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: National Institute of Justice Research Report, "Policing in Emerging Democracies: Workshop Papers and Highlights," Washington, D.C., December 14-15, 1995.

Annotation

Following a review of the dominant view of policing that is being used as a basis for providing advice to emerging democracies, this paper proposes an alternative framework and describes how the author is applying it in his work of policing transformation in South Africa.

Abstract

Under the current view of policing reform in countries that are experiencing a transformation from authoritarian rule to democracy, the police are to be transformed from authoritarian, partisan instruments of government into modern police institutions that are nonpartisan and democratically accountable. This conventional wisdom is fundamentally flawed, not because it is wrong in what it has to say about the police institutions in authoritarian countries, but because its view of policing and the institutions through which it is accomplished is much too limited. This flaw arises because the conventional wisdom on policing fails to comprehend, or even recognize, the fundamental transformation that has been occurring within policing over the past several decades. This is a period of neoliberal transition. At the core of this rethinking is a renewal of institutions of governance that involves a challenge to the assumption that governance should be a state monopoly and more particularly that it should be driven by the expert knowledge of state professionals. Under this conceptual framework, there are two sets of devolutionary strategies in established democracies, one that has provided the corporate communities with control of both the "rowing" and the "steering" of policing and the other that has sought to devolve to poor communities the "rowing" of policing but not its "steering." In South Africa, the effort to implement the alternative conceptual framework has sought to reshape the police in ways required by the conventional wisdom through retraining and enhanced accountability, engaging the state in ways that will provide for a relocation of control over tax revenues in a manner that will provide blacks with purchasing power, establishing blacks as powerful customers with ability to control their security, and striving to do this in a manner that will keep currency in the current South African political climate. 25 notes