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Policing Change, Changing Police: International Perspectives

NCJ Number
174031
Editor(s)
O Marenin
Date Published
1996
Length
364 pages
Annotation
These 12 essays focus on the changing patterns of policing in societies that are themselves changing and assess what such changes contribute to the understanding of the natures and forms of policing in general.
Abstract
An analysis of policing in Brazil emphasizes how that country's political and cultural traditions led to the legitimation of police violence and torture as a form of delegated vigilantism. The Brazilian experience also demonstrates the difficulty as well as the possibilities of changing the relations between the police, the government, and the public toward more democratic and accountable forms of policing. An essay on policing in El Salvador discusses how the struggle to construct a new form of policing in that country is also a struggle to overturn established forms of coercion and political and economic power. Further papers examine the legal and police systems of three Arab countries, Hong Kong, Italy, Great Britain in its use of security forces in Northern Ireland, South Africa, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the newly independent countries of the former USSR, and the European Union. Another paper examines changes in policing in the context of the global push toward privatization and market-based allocation rationales and systems for societal and government resources. The final paper presents general themes about policing and change and suggests that the development of policing, the government, and society are parallel and intertwined yet distinct process and that the police have the capacity, under certain conditions, to shape the production of themselves and their societal and statist settings. Figures, chapter notes and reference lists, and index