There is a Russian saying that "police mirror society." The gist of this is that every society is policed to the extent that it allows itself to be policed. Centralized in control but decentralized in their reach, the police are remarkably similar in structure, chain of command, and their relationships with the political elite across post-Soviet nations--they also remain one of the least reformed post-communist institutions. As a powerful state organ, the Soviet-style militarized police have resisted change despite democratic transformations in the overall political context, including rounds of competitive elections and growing civil society. While consensus between citizens and the state about reform may be possible in democratic nations, it is considerably more difficult to achieve in authoritarian states. Across post-Soviet countries, such discussions most often occur between political elites and powerful non-state actors, such as criminal syndicates and nationalistic ethnic groups, rather than the wider citizenry. Even in countries where one or more rounds of democratic elections have taken place since 1991, empowered citizens and politicians have not renegotiated the way states police and coerce society. On the contrary, in many post-Soviet countries, police functions have expanded to serve the interests of the ruling political elites. What does it take to reform a post-Soviet police force? This book explores the conditions in which a meaningful transformation of the police is likely to succeed and when it will fail. Departing from the conventional interpretation of the police as merely an institution of coercion, this book defines it as a medium for state-society consensus on the limits of the state's legitimate use of violence. It thus considers policing not as a way to measure the state's capacity to coerce society, but rather as a reflection of a complex society bound together by a web of casual interactions and political structures. The book compares reform efforts in Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan, finding that bottom-up public mobilization is likely to emerge in the aftermath of transformative violence--an incident when the usual patterns of policing are interrupted with unprecedented brutality against vulnerable individuals. Ultimately, The Politics of Police Reform examines the various pathways to transforming how the state relates to society through policing.

Police Reform: Building Integrity is about the recurring problem of police corruption and contemporary efforts to find effective strategies to maximise ethical conduct. It draws on international experience, using Australia as a major source. In the last fifteen years Australian policing has been of significant interest because of the combination of advanced democratic processes, exposés of serious police corruption, and extensive - sometimes radical - experimentation with prevention strategies. The book begins with an overview of developments and issues in police integrity control globally, before giving close attention to special problem areas and to innovations in establishing and maintaining best practice. These innovations include modern methods of testing police applicants, assessing organisational integrity, mediating complaints, using stings to reveal secretive corruption, creating integrity profiles of officers and units, and developing effective independent oversight and investigation of complaints. The book is for all stakeholders in police conduct: police managers, professional standards branch personnel, general duties officers, recruits, civilian oversight agencies, civil libertarians, politicians, police studies scholars and students, and the general public. The book brings together the latest research on types of misconduct in a form that is readily accessible to a wide range of readers; with short, clearly focused, chapters on specialist topics. It balances diagnostic and theoretical explanations of police behaviour with a series of expositions of specific practical strategies for creating ethical departments.

The contributions here discuss the issue of internationally assisted police reform in transitions from war to peace. They include theoretical insights and informed case studies and a discussion of the trend towards internationally provided executive authority policing.

This volume presents a unique examination of Western-led police reform efforts by theoretically linking neoliberal globalization, police reform and development. The authors present seven country case studies based on this theoretical and conceptual approach and assess the prospects for successful police reform in a global context.

The urgent need to professionalize Mexican police has been recognized since the early 1990s, but despite even the most well-intentioned promises from elected officials and police chiefs, few gains have been made in improving police integrity. Why have reform efforts in Mexico been largely unsuccessful? This book seeks to answer the question by focusing on Mexico's municipal police, which make up the largest percentage of the country's police forces. Indeed, organized crime presents a major obstacle to institutional change, with criminal groups killing hundreds of local police in recent years. Nonetheless, Daniel Sabet argues that the problems of Mexican policing are really problems of governance. He finds that reform has suffered from a number of policy design and implementation challenges. More importantly, the informal rules of Mexican politics have prevented the continuity of reform efforts across administrations, allowed patronage appointments to persist, and undermined anti-corruption efforts. Although many advances have been made in Mexican policing, weak horizontal and vertical accountability mechanisms have failed to create sufficient incentives for institutional change. Citizens may represent the best hope for counterbalancing the toxic effects of organized crime and poor governance, but the ambivalent relationship between citizens and their police must be overcome to break the vicious cycle of corruption and ineffectiveness.

The police are much more than a segment in the civil administration system. The manner in which they respond to violations of law and order, place restraints on personal freedom, prevent the occurrence of crime and detect crime, all generate debates and controversies. Timely reform is evitable to ensure their ability to cope with emerging challenges to the management of crime and order. Various aspects of policing like its evolution, structure, functioning etc. have been analyzed in this book with the help of primary data collected both from the public as well as the police by applying the method of purposive sampling. Contents: Introduction, Police in Kerala: A Historical Approach, Kerala Police: A Functional Analysis, A Survey of Police Reforms in Kerala, Police Reforms in Kerala: Need and Directions Public Perception, Police Reforms Need and Directions: Police Perspective, Conclusions and Suggestions.

"This book is the first thorough study of the Justice Department's pattern or practice program, examining how the program works, how court-imposed consent decrees implement needed reforms, and discussing the various challenges the program has encountered over nearly thirty years"--

Community policing has often been promoted, particularly in liberal democratic societies, as the best approach to align police services with the principles of good security sector governance (SSG). The stated goal of the community policing approach is to reduce fear of crime within communities, and to overcome mutual distrust between the police and the communities they serve by promoting police-citizen partnerships. This SSR Paper traces the historical origins of the concept of community policing in Victorian Great Britain and analyses the processes of transfer, implementation, and adaptation of approaches to community policing in Imperialand post-war Japan, Singapore, and Timor-Leste. The study identifies the factors that were conducive or constraining to the establishment of community policing in each case. It concludes that basic elements of police professionalism and local ownership are necessary preconditions for successfully implementing community policing according to the principles of good SSG. Moreover, external initiatives for community policing must be more closely aligned to the realities of the local context.

How has the supposedly liberalizing project of police reform in Turkey become central to the increasingly authoritarian regime of Erdogan's AKP Party? Engaging political theory and a gender studies perspective, this book traces the implementation of security sector reform in Turkey, showing how various agents, including Islamist policy-makers, Turkish police and the women's movement in Turkey have contributed to and resisted growing police powers. A critical study which also employs case studies, this is a timely intervention on the 'authoritarian turn' in Turkey and contributes to a growing number of studies of neoliberalism and security in the context of liberal internationalism. Produced in association with the British Institute at Ankara