Overview

Comparing the use of violence by police forces in Latin America and the United States as well as in the Caribbean, and drawing on considerable field research, Chevigny investigates torture and the use of deadly force, in addition to less drastic forms of police violence, in six major urban centres. He examines military and community models of policing and the connection between corruption and violence. The author also compares institutions of accountability as diverse as criminal and civil courts, administrative disciplines, civilian review boards, internal controls and external auditors, and the pressure exerted by international human-rights standards. Searching for the sources of official violence, and ultimately for ways of controlling it, he argues that the way in which criminal matters are patrolled and investigated correlates with the city's social order. Chevigny arrives at the conclusion that when citizens have little confidence in their government, do not participate in it or look to it for protection, they turn to violent self-help, and thus police violence becomes the mirror of vigilantism. A growing fear of crime, combined with a sense of powerlessness and lack of participation also lends public support to extra-legal violence by the police themselves, whose activities are often fostered and protected by official corruption. Conversely, persistent government action against crime, including accountability for police violence, discourages vigilantism as well as official violence.

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9781565841833

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New York University law professor Chevigny looks for instructive patterns in the behavior of police forces in New York City, Los Angeles, Silo Paulo, Buenos Aires, Kingston, Jamaica, and Mexico City. The question that interests Chevigny (Police Power, 1969; Cops and Rebels, 1972), who has written extensively about police abuse for human rights organizations, is why some police forces are more prone to violence than others. He believes such an understanding is key to police reform. His conclusion in this thoroughly researched study is that police work reproduces and represents the larger social order, and . . . tolerance of violence reflects the relation between the government and its citizens. Thus, Los Angeles has a worse record than New York in part because a strong streak of western vigilantism . . . was absorbed into police conduct. One reason more than a thousand people are killed by the police in Silo Pauio each year is that Brazilian society divides the citizenry into the wild and the cultivated. Its police force, organized along paramilitary lines, is prone to use violence against a well-defined enemy, which in this case becomes the lower classes. Reform is coming slowly to cities like Silo Paulo as authorities realize that, as a form of lawlessness itself, such violence fails to give ballast to the state's authority. Further, people are learning that there is no correlation between police violence and a reduction in crime. On the other hand, there is a threat of increased police violence in America as rising economic pressures and the fear of crime . . . create a constant temptation to arbitrary violence as a supposed shortcut to order. Chevigny's book is dull going for the average reader but should be of intense interest to students of police power and practitioners of reform. (Kirkus Reviews)

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