Police reform in postcolonial states

1
Police reform in post-colonial states

• Alice Hills
• DCOIS workshop, Geneva, 1-2 Nov. 2001

2
Overview

• Provides perspective on police role
• Represents a laboratory for the West
• Illustrates police interaction with other agents
• Emphasises the factors inhibiting change

3
Change is key

• What promotes change?

• What inhibits change?

4
What promotes change?

• Political imperatives
• Resources
• Motivation
• Training
• Improvements in status
• Professionalisation?

5
Does professionalisation help?

• No universal definition
• Applied to administrative, ethical, technical and
  status issues
• Not related to efficiency, effectiveness or moral
  choices
• Aspirational

6
What inhibits change?

• Unsuitable/unsustainable aid
• Limited managerial capacity
• Political environment
• Function and role of the police
• Interaction between security agents
• Institutional resilience
• Rational calculation
• Survival skills and strategies

7
What is policing?

• Needs broad definition
• State police only one agent amongst many

8
Typical policing agents
religious police (Sharia)
clan militia (Somalia)
militia (Kamajor)
township police
local vigilantes
vigilante (sungusungu)
special security units
rapid reaction forces
para- militaries ( SSD)
elite units (Scorpions)
freelance police (Zaire)
Army
State police
special units (Lagos)
presidential units
militia (Bakassi Boys)
politicians private armies
ethnic militia (OPC)
death squads
9
Institutional resilience

• What are its characteristics?
• Is resilience inherent/incidental?
• What factors promote it?

10
Survival skills

• Personal skills
• Institutional resources
• Rational calculation
• Disorder as political instrument

11
What do the police think?

• Best placed to evaluate political change
• Accommodate unavoidable change

12
Conclusion

• Police reveal and shape state power
• SSR a multi-faceted dilemma
• Means of change not self-evident
• Little fundamental change since 1960s

13
Techniques may have changed in recent years but
wars, liberalisation and international aid have
left most policing and most police systems
fundamentally unchangedSSR has to engage with
the nature of power