Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population An Evidence-Based Approach (2022) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 1-12
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, provides foreign assistance and supports capacity building for criminal justice systems and police organizations in approximately 90 countries around the world. It has a mandate to "strengthen fragile states, support democratic transitions, and stabilize conflict-affected societies by helping partner countries develop effective and accountable criminal justice sector institutions and systems."1 With such a purpose, INL is part of a larger network of international and regional organizations, bilateral donors, international financial institutions, and civil society organizations that work in the broad area of police reform and capacity building in the security sector around the world.
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When developing programs to assist with police reform, it is important to identify and make transparent the governance, labor, and political conditions that present barriers to sustained reform -- whether they be under-resourced police agencies, forms of political repression, or an overlap between police and political elites and organized crime. With additional information, such consideration can help illuminate where and when it is feasible to proceed with any promising interventions, where it is best not to proceed, and where it is feasible to proceed but only with a plan for evading or overcoming any obstacles.
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As noted earlier, much existing knowledge from research focuses on the effects of policing approaches on crime prevention. However, a growing body of research also addresses evidence on such concerns as police efforts to improve relationships with the communities they serve; to improve trust and satisfaction in specific interactions with citizens; or to strengthen internal accountability mechanisms for rule-of-law policing.
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The committee examined and compared two of the most comprehensive efforts: The one undertaken by the World Justice Project and the other by the Varieties of Democracies Project. The committee found a high level of correlation between these two indices, and it found a strong positive correlation between a commitment to ROL and a country's human rights score as well as its level of democracy.2 As such, the committee recognizes that future research can, in principle, assess whether police reforms can achieve outcomes with an impact on improving ROL.
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Since a fundamental component of the rule of law is that the state be held accountable to the law, and since the state delegates considerable power to the police, police institutions have great responsibility to act in ways consistent with laws and international human rights norms and standards. Promoting the rule of law therefore requires laws and policies that establish clear limits to police authority and actions -- particularly regarding the use of force -- as well as mechanisms for meaningful oversight and accountability.
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Internal governance that includes effective, independent investigative units within agencies may increase government and police legitimacy and foster public trust. Systematic evidence is available on internal governance structures, and it shows that police organizations with internal affairs or professional standards units that provide internal, independent checks and balances are better equipped to prevent corruption within the organization than those without cross-checks.
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The extent to which police extend procedural justice and fairness to members of the community is likely to depend on the extent to which procedural fairness internal to a police organization encompasses respect perceived by police in their relationship with their supervisors and fairness and inclusion in decision making. PROACTIVE POLICING PRACTICES Proactive policing includes any task that is initiated by a police agency for the purpose of reducing harm and detecting signs of crime.
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Problem solving may be particularly effective at reducing crime when police target conditions and situations at specific locations and "hot spots" where crime concentrates. Community-oriented policing is both a philosophy of policing and an organizational practice in which people within a jurisdiction, community, or neighborhood play a more active role in co-producing public safety and holding the police accountable to community concerns.
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This body of research finds that while crime prevention or deterrence benefits are inconsistent, some community-oriented policing programs can improve citizen satisfaction with police services (although the impacts on perceptions of police legitimacy may be weaker)
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Existing training programs that discuss police organizational structures, policies, and practices need to reflect the available evidence related to organizational structures, policies, and practices. Foreign assistance donors, such as INL, should examine their training in light of material and resources provided here and be prepared to continue to adapt curricula as additional new knowledge emerges.
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Foreign assistance donors are in a position to help facilitate the development of a research framework to assess policing interventions in multiple contexts, as well as the development of police-researcher partnerships to expand available policing research and advance evidence-based policing. Local research capacity exists in many countries, even in areas of high violence and civil unrest, but may lack the funding and incentives to form police-researcher partnerships.
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